


Rewind Electric

by Nyxelestia



Series: Take the Third Door Together [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But No One In This Town Stays Dead, Decapitation, Gen, Marcel (Surgeon), Nemeton, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Multiple, Post-Episode: s05e10 Status Asthmaticus, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, everyone dies, minor gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 00:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15497826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyxelestia/pseuds/Nyxelestia
Summary: Scott closed his eyes to the sensation of blood pouring out of the wound in his chest, the library staircase underneath his back, and Theo Raeken walking away from him as he died.Scott opened his eyes to the sensation of blood pouring out of a wound in his side, forest floor under his back, and the top half of Laura Hale’s body at his side.When Beacon Hills goes to hell, Lydia Martin refuses to accept everyone's deaths.With the help of an angry Nemeton, a regretful Dread Doctor's time dilation, and the Ghost Riders' powerful train, she doesn't have to.





	1. Allison Argent

“You have to tell my dad,” Allison gasped out. She couldn’t see Oak Creek around them, she already lost sight of Kira in her peripheral vision, and her world was growing darker still. But they had to know the silver could kill the Oni- “You have to…”

She didn’t know if she ever even finished her sentence. Her eyes fell shut, and Scott faded away as she died.

And then she woke up.

The feeling of Scott’s arms around her became the sensation of comfortable SUV seating, half her face smushed into cold glass. Her eyes flickered open just in time for her to see the _Welcome to Beacon Hills_ sign that everyone driving the 115 saw on the way into town.

“Allison?”

She froze at the sound of her mother’s voice coming from the driver’s seat.

_No._

This had to be a trick. Just another trick.

Yet when she turned around-

“ _Mom?!_ ” Allison cried out.

Victoria Argent frowned, glancing at Allison while trying to keep her focus on the road.

“What?” she asked, voice as sharp and severe as Allison remembered it.

Allison said nothing, blinking at her.

“Allison?” Mom asked again, concern seeping into her voice.

“W-Where are we?” she asked. Was this Bardo? Or the afterlife?

“We just reached Beacon Hills,” Mom said, her severe expression softening into something approaching nostalgia. “You weren’t asleep for too long, less than two hours.”

Allison looked down at her outfit, looked back in the car, looked out the window-

She pulled out her phone, and damn near swallowed her tongue when she saw the date, which was _wrong_ , which was showing the date from over ten months ago.

Impossible.

“What is the matter with you?” Mom demanded.

“I…” _I died. I lived for ten months and I died. I went through the best and worst ten months of my life and I died._ “I had a weird dream.”

A dream — ten months, nearly a year of chaos and love and strife and there was no way she could have dreamed of _that much_ in less than two hours.

Right?

Except time didn’t really work right in dreams, and wasn’t that also right?

“A ‘weird dream’?” Mom asked, her voice inquisitive yet neutral. That tone used to put Allison on edge. Now, after having been the Argent Matriarch — even if it was for barely half a year — she recognized that tone, the sound of someone carefully concealing their true feelings.

Maybe. Because if it was all just a crazy dream, then this was just mom’s Mom Voice and Allison was crazy. Could she ask? Except if it was a dream, then did she want Mom thinking she was crazy? Worse, if it _wasn’t_ a dream, then did she want her Mom to _know_?

“It was vivid,” Allison said, patting herself down. She didn’t have any of her knives, and of course not, why would she? Ten months ago, knives were weapons she never expected to use or need. They lived in her purse or in her car, and she only ever used them in a training room with her parents or her aunt. And maybe she just dreamed of getting into the habit of carrying them everywhere, maybe ‘ten months ago’ wasn’t _really_ ten months ago-

“How vivid?” Mom asked.

“We…” Allison _could_ keep the wobble out of her voice, but god, Mom had died and everything with their family went to hell and Allison- “We both died. I swear, Mom, I…I…”

“Maybe a fever dream?” Mom said, reaching over and pressing her palm to Allison’s forehead, chancing a look away from the road. “Well, you don’t feel sick-” “MOM LOOK OUT!” Allison shouted, just as a jeans-and-red-hoodie-clad figure ran out into the road.

As Mom swerved around the boy to not hit him, tried desperately to get a look at the boy’s face, yet they were going too fast for her to get even a decent look and see if she recognized the boy whose arms she just died in. She turned around, trying to see if they’d almost hit her first love.

Except, just like last time, Mom kept going.

“You have to go back!” Allison demanded, and kept demanding through a fight she remembered, a fight from almost a year ago and yet she was repeating right now.

“He was standing in the middle of the road-”

“What if he’s hurt?”

Mom scowled, but obliged.

Despite Allison’s desperate hopes, though, their fight didn’t go faster enough this time around. She found the tire marks on the road from where they swerved, and she found the footprints leading into the forest.

At the end of the trail, she found the inhaler, and fought down tears when she read the name on it.

~*~

God, Allison felt like such an idiot, now that she was seeing the signs of her family’s Hunting everywhere.

When they arrived at the new house, she could see that some of the plants in the garden served multiple purposes at once. Dad wasn’t there, and now Allison knew it wasn’t because his meeting ran late, but because he was probably out in the Preserve, trying to figure out what was going with the deer with the revenge spiral and the Hale pack and Kate was still alive and out there and-

“Go to bed,” Mom said, as she sequestered herself into what was to be the Argent Arms Home Office, what Allison now knew would also be the headquarters for the Hunting clan. “First day at a new school, tomorrow.”

First day at Beacon Hills High School tomorrow, where she would meet Lydia and Scott and Stiles and Jackson and Isaac-

Except no, she never met Isaac until after he was Bitten, but right now he was human and still living with his psychotic father and Erica still had epilepsy and Boyd was probably just coming home from the ice rink and Laura Hale just died which meant Derek was losing his damn mind and he hated the Argents and-

“Allison?” Mom asked, and Allison realized she’d been standing in the doorway of her old — new? — room for several minutes.

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “And yeah, I…I guess I could really use the sleep.”

Mom nodded, her smile concerned but her eyes still warm. She wrapped her arms around Allison and kissed her forehead. Despite everything — Mom breaking the Code above all else — Allison couldn’t help but lean into this affection she missed.

“Still not feverish,” Mom muttered into Allison’s hair. “But maybe just the long car ride. I’m sure it’s nothing a good night’s sleep in an actual bed can’t fix.”

~*~

It didn’t, because the next time Allison woke, it was only the next morning, the first day of school.

She took a deep breath as she got dressed, missing her weapons after months and months of getting dressed with them. She usually managed to hide them on her person, even at school. In the rare instances she couldn’t, she’d usually found a way to hide some in her bag so at least they were within reach — yet now, she didn’t even have that much.

But she did have the proof that she wasn’t _completely_ crazy. Even if she did have some crazy dream last night, some of it was real, and at least one name in that dream — one name she she had no way of knowing beforehand — turned out to be real.

And it wasn’t the only thing. Allison almost cried when Mom dropped her off at school, and she saw Lydia stride in, running up to a younger and more arrogant Jackson to latch onto his arm. She saw Stiles hugging Scott, and she saw Matt with his camera, and she Derek’s betas, and she saw the kids that had been killed by the Darach-

She collapsed on the little wall by the edge of school, and didn’t even care that she was repeating history when Mom called on her drive back home to check up on Allison.

Allison had to fight down a laugh when she realized, in all the emotional turmoil and her inner confusion and her downright shock at everything- “I forgot my pen.”

Again.

What was happening? There was no way she could’ve dreamed ten months of life in a two hours nap, she had no ability to tell the future, she was just repeating history with _no idea why_.

Except that, no matter how, she was in the past — alive, her memories and knowledge intact, and her heart beating to _her_ Code. With or without any idea how she ended up here, she was here now…and maybe she could save some lives.

Maybe she could protect some people who could not protect themselves.

She almost bounced into the administration office, biting her lip when they issued her the temporary ID and the schedule and the counselor led her to her first class.

“Everyone,” he introduced her. “I would like you to meet your new classmate, Allison Argent.”

The entire class was looking at her, mostly in idle curiosity — save for Scott and Stiles and Lydia, sitting in roughly the same seats as Allison remembered them sitting ‘back’ in sophomore year, and all with indecipherable looks on their faces.

“Hello,” Allison greeted the class with an awkward wave, a class full of people who didn’t know yet what kind of monster Kate was and so didn’t know her as just ‘the Arson Argent’s niece’. Wait, did she wave last time? Say hello? Did it _matter_?

She took the same seat as last time, and now knowing that Scott had been in the throes of his transformation, now knowing how the first thing Scott had heard with supernatural hearing had been _her_ , she wasn’t surprised when he turned around in his seat as she rifled through her bag.

“Here,” Scott said, holding out a pen. Allison smiled as she looked at the pen she’d kept until the day she died.

“Just like last time,” he continued, handing it toward her.

Her hand, halfway to reaching for the pen, froze in midair.

“W-what?” she asked.

Scott’s face fell, and it was only then that Allison realized he had been looking at her earlier not in the same idle curiosity as the rest of the class, but in _recognition_.

“I’m sorry,” Scott said, with a forced, apologetic smile. “I, uh, I wanted to make you feel welcome and I figured offering a pen would be a good way?”

He recognized her, and he thought she didn’t recognize him.

Taking a deep breath, Allison reached down to her bag, pulled out Scott’s inhaler, and handed it over to him — turning it around to show him his name on it.

Scott’s jaw actually dropped when he saw it. He reached out slowly, as if terrified that it would disappear, and gasped softly when he took it in his hand. He didn’t even notice when Allison took the pen.

“It’s not just me,” she breathed out, as Scott’s face broke out into one of the widest grins she’d ever seen on him — which was saying something, as she’s pretty sure some of the best and worst times of _her_ life were also those of his.

“No,” Scott agree. “It isn’t, we-”

“ _Scott!_ ” the teacher called out. “Turn around, class is starting now.”

“We’ll talk later,” Scott promised under his breath as he turned around.

Allison ducked her head and smiled down at her desk.

She couldn’t wait.


	2. Scott McCall

Scott closed his eyes to the sensation of blood pouring out of the wound in his chest, the library staircase underneath his back, and Theo Raeken walking away from him as he died.

Scott opened his eyes to the sensation of blood pouring out of a wound in his side, forest floor under his back, and the top half of Laura Hale’s body at his side.

With a yelp, he scrambled away, falling over a familiar ledge and rolling down a familiar hill and landing against a familiar log.

“What the…” With a groan, Scott looked down at the ground that seemed a few inches too close to his gaze, shoes he’d long since thrown out, and a hoodie he hadn’t worn in years.

Because of the tears in the fabric and the blood currently soaking it now.

From the night he’d been Bitten.

He whirled around toward where he remembered the body being, except he heard movement in the distance, was that the animal that had bitten him? Except no, there was no animal, but an insane alpha werewolf except Peter was in Eichen House yet Scott was somehow dressed in clothes from years ago and a few inches shorter and _why couldn’t he smell anything_?

Stumbling down a semi-familiar path toward the nearest road, Scott gasped as his lungs seized up in a way they hadn’t in years — or at least, years until the last month or so, with the Dread Doctors and the chimeras and Theo who turned out to be as traitorous as Stiles thought and oh god where the hell was Stiles where was Kira what happened to Liam whathappenedtohimself what-

A loud, angry car horn blasted in his ears as an SUV swerved to avoid hitting him.

He was either losing his mind, or the SUV was familiar, too.

What had Allison said about her Nemeton vision? That it led her here and now? That she’d nearly hit someone on the way into town and how she tried to find them-

-and couldn’t, not at first, because of Victoria Argent.

Swallowing, Scott reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and stared at the impossible date on the screen.

Was he in Bardo again?

Was this another trick from the Dread Doctors?

Possibly.

Maybe even probably.

But whether it was a trick, or something else entirely, the last time Scott had ever seen Victoria Argent was when she’d tried to kill him. He wasn’t going to let her — or some crazy Dread Doctor version of her or his own Bardo vision of her — find him with a fresh werewolf bite in his side.

With a groan and a sigh, he crossed the road and started on his path through the woods back home, remembering just how much grumbling he’d done the last time he had to do this, so long ago.

God, he missed the days when _this_ had been his biggest problem.

~*~

At home, he had to pause inside the doorway and just stop and stare at the inside of his house.

No one had nearly died in here. No kanima nor geriatric Hunter nor demonic fox spirit had set foot in this home. There was no tingle of mountain ash lurking on the edge of his senses. There were no dents in the walls from him or Isaac or Liam, no scorch marks from Kira practicing with her electricity powers, and no claw marks on his bedroom windowsill from Derek clambering in.

Thank god mom had been at work the night he was Bitten — was at work _now_ — because he spent a solid hour crying into his pillow when he realized that.

How often had he wanted to go back? How often had he wanted his life to go back to what it used to be?

Scott would almost believe he’d simply died and maybe some higher power really saw that he’d done the best he could and let him go to a better place, to something like heaven.

He would almost believe that — except he still had a Bite wound he needed to clean up in the bathroom, one whose consequences Scott knew.

Maybe there was something he could’ve done, something that he missed, and he was now being punished in the afterlife.

How else could he explain being sent back so _close_ to what he’d almost always wanted ever since he learned that myths were real…and yet _just_ not close enough to save his own humanity?

He sighed in frustration as he peeled out of the hoodie. Almost two years ago, he’d had to struggle out of his clothes, unfamiliar with the process. Now, he almost slipped out of them, accustomed as he was to getting himself out of torn and bloodied clothing from years of strife.

Whimpering under the hot spray of the shower, Scott shuddered through cleaning himself up and bandaging the wound and stumbling into bed for-

For what? For Peter Hale? For Derek losing his mind after losing Laura? For the first day of school? For-

For meeting Allison for the first time.

The tears came forward all over again.

~*~

Scott wasn’t sure what he’d prayed for or dreaded, but either way, he still woke up in the morning — on the first day of winter semester in sophomore year.

Mom was back home and asleep, her face unlined with the stress of the supernatural war her son had dragged her into.

He wanted to hug her, to wake her up and figure out what she knew, if she knew anything at all.

Instead, he let her sleep.

Downstairs, he laughed when he went to the garage to find not his dirt bike, but his old chain bike waiting for him.

As annoying as it was, as much as the bite wound pulled at his side, as terrifying as his new circumstances were, he laughed when he realized he’d have to pedal himself to school again.

His laughter broke down into sobbing, crying for the third time since he’d…died? Woken up?

The tears dried as he pedaled to school.

On the edge of campus, he looked up the library, the one he’d fought Liam in…last night? Almost two years from now?

Was Scott still in there, and this was all some weird Dread Doctor hallucination or another Bardo experience?

Had he died there, and this was some bizarre after life?

What-

Yet again, he was knocked out of his confused inner monologue by the loud blaring of a car.

Except this time, it was a very different kind of familiar.

“Out of the way, McCall!” Jackson shouted out the window of his Porsche.

It’d been barely six hours since he woke up by Laura’s body after being killed in the school library. The fact that he’d cried so many times since then is probably the only reason he didn’t break out into tears again now. He walked his bike back onto sidewalk, watching in awe as the Porsche smoothly slid into the parking spot by the bike racks.

Swallowing, Scott started toward the racks, slowing his pace because he wasn’t sure he could face the old Jackson directly.

And this _was_ the old Jackson. This was Jackson before he moved to London, before he was turned into a kanima, before he ever even knew about werewolves.

This was a Jackson Scott could save.

Who else could he save?

As soon as he finished chaining up his bike, he started looking around, spotting the JAFROTC cadet Ms. Blake had killed as one of her warrior sacrifices, and Erica in the distance keeping her head down as she scuttled into school, and there was Josh the junior who’d died a chimera except that was what Theo had told him but Stiles had told him too-

And there was Stiles now.

With a buzzcut and a graphic tee, Stiles almost tackled him in a hug-

“Oh, my god, I missed you buddy,” Stiles said.

-which Scott _knew_ hadn’t happened last time.

“Missed me?” Scott asked, confused, wincing in pain.

Stiles must’ve seen that out of the corner of his eye or felt it because he suddenly pulled back, looking awkward and…scared?

“Yeah, y’know, in the last, uh…” Stiles looked around, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. “What’s it been, half a night? I was worried about you.”

Stiles looked anxious and suspicious in a calculated way that he’d learned not from his father or from school, but from a Darach and a nogitsune and a deadpool.

“We went out there looking for a body, and I was worried that whoever or whatever killed the girl might’ve gotten you too,” Stiles said, with a level of forethought he’d never had until multiple fights for their lives forced him to learn. Swallowing, Stiles’ gaze flickered down to Scott’s side before looking back up at his face again.

Two years ago, Scott wouldn’t have noticed the quick glance at a wound he hadn’t told Stiles about yet.

Two years ago, was _now_.

“Did anything, like, attack you?” Stiles said, pausing a little too long for his words to be his first thoughts, his _real_ thoughts. “Maybe an animal or something?”

Apparently three times in six hours wasn’t enough, because Scott’s eyes burned and his throat lumped up, and he had to swallow twice to answer.

“Yeah,” he said, lifting up the edge of his shirt to show the bloodied bandage taped to his side. As Stiles seemed to swallow down tears of his own, Scott said, “Peter Bit me again.”

Stiles froze, wide eyes slowly trailing up Scott’s side to his face, hold his breath even as Scott dropped the shirt back to cover his side.

“…Scotty?” he asked.

Scott nodded. “Seven hours ago, I was a senior and an alpha. Six hours ago, I woke up next to Laura Hale’s body, with Peter’s Bite already in me.”

With a cry of something like joy and anguish in equal measures, Stiles threw his arms around Scott and pulled him close, and Scott returned the hug. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see some people snickering at them, and god he missed the days when that was _all_ they got, before their classmates started associating them with dead bodies all over town.

“I remember finding out the alpha is Peter Hale,” Scott started. “And the Argents, and-”

“Jackson, the kanima,” Stiles continued.

Scott nodded as he pressed his face, his still-human nose, into Stiles’ neck. “And Matt and Gerard.”

“And Derek and the Darach,” Stiles said, clutching Scott’s shoulders tight

“And the Alpha pack,” Scott continued, finally pulling away

“And the Nemeton?” Stiles asked.

Scott nodded. “And Malia and the nogitsune and Kate coming back from the dead and the deadpool and the Berserkers-”

“What about the Dread Doctors?” Stiles asked.

Scott nodded again. “Dread Doctors and chimeras and-” He gasped, as one of the last things he saw in…in the future?…came back to him. “And Theo! Stiles, oh my god, you were right about Theo, last night-”

“Last night?” Stiles asked, face scrunching up in confusion.

Scott frowned in his own confusion. “Yeah, last night, after Mom took Hayden to the hospital? I went to the library looking for Lydia but then Theo was there and Stiles, he’s a chimera, and _he can use mountain ash_ , and he used it to trap me in with Liam and…we…”

He trailed off as Stiles’ expression sunk from bewilderment into horror, his own breath freezing entirely as a stray tear feel from Stiles’ shining eyes.

“Scott, buddy,” Stiles said, clutching his backpack straps and slowly shaking his head. “That wasn’t last night. That was months ago. You died half a year ago.”


	3. Stiles Stilinski

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm already two days in posting this so I haven't been able to edit it properly. Please let me know if you spot any typos, and please be advised that I might make some minor edits in the future. :)

When they got to Shiprock, Stiles damn near crashed into the red Toyota Prius. He winced at the new car’s flat tires, even as he shouted, “GET IN!” to Kira and her mom, praying the Skinwalkers didn’t have good aim with their spears.

They didn’t.

“Damn,” Liam muttered, turning in the back seat to watch what Stiles was seeing in the rearview mirror — the brand new car getting sucked into the earth.

“I hope you guys had good insurance on that,” Stiles muttered. Next to him, Noshiko actually chuckled.

In the back seat, next to Liam, Kira smiled in relief — and Stiles swallowed, knowing that relief wasn’t going to last long.

Or at all, since the first thing she asked when she got her breath back was, “Where’s Scott?”

Liam froze.

Noshiko and Kira both noticed.

“Why don’t you show her, Liam?” Stiles bit out.

“Show me what?” Kira asked, shoulders tensing as she realized something was wrong. Noshiko turned in her seat to face them. Liam whined, a low and puppyish sound completely at odds with his new power, but no one answered. “Show me _what_?”

Liam actually started to cry. Stiles gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles when Kira reached out a comforting hand to wrap around his shoulders.

“Cut it out!” Stiles snarled at Liam, who flinched. “You have _no right_!”

“Stiles!” Kira snapped. “What-”

“Show her!” Stiles demanded, speeding down the highway back to Beacon Hills — though at this point it was more like Beacon Hell.

“I-I’m sorry,” Liam said, as his eyes started glowing bright, alpha red.

Noshiko hissed as the implication hitting her right away as she turned back around to look out the windshield. In the rearview mirror, Stiles watched Kira shake her head slowly, not taking her eyes off of Liam’s even when the red faded away.

“No,” she whimpered, tears starting to fall as she shook her head. “How could this happen?”

Stiles grit his teeth. 

“You wanna tell her, or should I?” he sneered at Liam.

Liam flinched, turning away from Kira and Stiles in shame.

Kira figured it out pretty quickly, grief melting into shocked fury. “What — what did you _do_?”

“I…” Liam shuddered. “I thought…I just…I wanted to save Hayden. And Scott _wouldn’t_.”

The air started to crackle.

Stiles swore under his breath, even as Noshiko snapped, “Kira!”

She didn’t seem to hear them, eyes burning a bright amber as she glared at Liam — who didn’t return her gaze.

Fox flame started to spark around her.

“Kira!” Noshiko yelled again. “We’re still in Skinwalker land, he can’t pull over!”

“Scott’s _dead_ ,” Kira declared, Kira and another voice, Kira and a fox who loved wolves despite all of her — their? — parents’ misgivings.

“Yeah,” Stiles said, swallowing. “And he’s not the only one.”

Kira turned to him, away from Liam. In the rearview mirror, he could only glimpse the outline of her fox made of foxfire.

But that was in the mirror — which meant it might be fully formed, if he’d turned around and actually _looked_.

The fox tilted her head. “Who else?” Kira demanded, and beside him, Noshiko tensed.

Stiles swallowed. He wanted to make Liam tell her, but he really couldn’t afford for the fox to blow up his car this far from Beacon Hills, especially when he still wasn’t sure if they’d lost the Skinwalkers yet.

“I was right about Theo,” Stiles said. Hopefully, giving her a target that was all the way over in Beacon Hills would keep the furious fox from doing anything drastic until they got there. “And Scott was right about Biting an unstable chimera. Hayden died — and so did all the other chimeras Liam…” Bit, hunted down, attacked in desperation and rage on Theo’s orders- “Tried to save.”

And there it was. The Kira’s face hardened into determination — while beside her, Liam started crying. Again.

Not even two weeks ago, Stiles would’ve cared. He would’ve been ready to fight whatever made someone in his pack cry, he would’ve been ready to take down whoever dared threaten their pack, or he would’ve at least offered Liam a hug.

But that was before Liam killed Scott.

That was before Malia worked with Theo, even _after_ he put Lydia in the hospital.

That was before-

“My dad’s dead, too,” Stiles said, trying to keep his voice as flat as possible.

Kira gasped, and the fox shuddered.

The rest of the hour was spent with the kitsunes listening to Stiles explain what’d happened since they left town, with Liam filling in the occasional gap here and there of what he’d picked up from Theo.

The rest of the drive after that was spent in cold, deadly silence.

~*~

Once they got back in town, Kira didn’t even look at Liam as she slammed out of the jeep and stormed into the Animal Clinic, the _We’ll Be Open Tomorrow!_ sign nearly falling off the front door under the force of her rage.

Inside, she spared only a passing glance for Deaton, slumped over his desk in blank-faced grief as Braeden tended to his wrists, before she turned to glare at Malia.

Kira’s face softened for only a moment when she saw the bullet holes in Malia’s midsection.

But then her expression hardened again as she must have remembered how Malia came by her injuries in the first place.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Malia said, seeing the look on Kira’s face, her hands wrapped around her bloody belly. “I got this from Theo. Corrinne was going to kill me, but…”

“But it appears Lydia is gaining an untold mastery of her powers,” Deaton said, and Stiles wanted to crawl right out of his skin at the man’s voice. The man was always infuriatingly neutral, but at least he still had heart in his voice, reined in as it was.

Right now, he sounded as dead inside as Scott was in reality.

“She’s still in Eichen House,” Braeden said. “Miles away from where we were, but we heard her scream right before all the lights blew out. So we grabbed Deaton and ran.”

“Theo betrayed us to Corrinne,” Malia continued.

“Just like he betrayed everyone,” Kira said. She narrowed her eyes, and for a moment, Stiles wondered if maybe he should have let her stay with the Skinwalkers after all. “And then you worked with him, anyway.”

“I was planning to use him and _kill him_!” Malia snapped.

Deaton didn’t react to that at all. Stiles wondered how much longer the man was going to bother staying alive, now that his surrogate son, the boy holding his hopes and dreams for the future, was dead.

“Where is he? Theo?” Kira demanded.

Malia’s jaw tensed. “I don’t-”

“ _Where is he?!_ ”

Before Malia could say anything else, a small voice from behind them all said, “The old waterway tunnels.” They all turned to Liam. “Where Scott saw, when he…when he clawed Corey.”

Malia growled at the sight of Liam, but no one — not even Noshiko — intervened when Kira slammed Liam into the wall with one hand, the other one brandishing her sword.

“Where _exactly_?” she and the fox demanded.

~*~

The next day, Kira gave Melissa a box.

Stiles wondered what it said about their lives that the head nurse of Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital took one look at the teenager’s head inside of it, at Kira’s sword covered in Theo’s blood, at the foxfire girl in front of her, and said, “ _Thank you._ ”

The day after that was was the Scott’s funeral.

The first funeral of many.

~*~

Stiles’ inner voice, that sounded exactly like Scott, screamed about Liam and wondered if he’d made it out of Eichen House okay.

The rest of him couldn’t care less.

He slumped against the brick wall of the Animal Clinic, watching Lydia cry into into her mother’s shoulder. Ms. Martin held her numbly, staring at the mistletoe-filled hole in her daughter’s head.

Once sure that Lydia would live, Deaton turned to the dead body in Kira’s arms.

“I tried,” Kira murmured hoarsely, almost cuddling Malia’s corpse close to her chest. “T-to hold onto the electricity surge, but she…but I…”

The amount of electricity it took to stun a thunder kitsune, was more than enough to kill a shapeshifter.

Stiles’ ears were still ringing from Lydia’s scream.

Apart from Stiles’ inner Scotty voice, he couldn’t care less what happened to Liam, but he got his answer anyway when he heard the boy’s mournful howl outside.

A shaking hellhound stumbled into the clinic.

Jordan froze at the sight of Kira cradling the body in her arms, refusing to put Malia down — which was just as well, because with Lydia collapsing into her mother’s arms on the exam table, it’s not like there was anywhere to put her.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ms. Martin demanded of Jordan. Stiles startled at the angry expression on the amicable deputy’s face.

“I _told_ you,” he ground out, ashy fist clenching by his burnt up shorts. “Not to put Lydia in Eichen House. _I told you!_ ”

“You think this is _my_ fault?!” Ms. Martin cried out.

Jordan and Ms. Martin both looked about ready to throw down, but before either of them could, Lydia whimpered, “ _Stop._ ”

Everyone in the clinic turned to look at her. Even Scott’s killer, lurking in the doorway and coming no closer, looked at her. The tear tracks down Liam’s face reflected some of the streetlight coming in through the window, almost glowing when the rest of his face was in shadow.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault this is,” Lydia said, voice coarser than the bricks at Stiles’ back. “Malia’s still dead.”

Which meant even more funerals about two weeks later.

Mr. Tate lost his daughter less than a year after getting her back, and his fury almost made up for his meager humanity as he set out to avenge his family.

 _Almost_.

At least when Braeden and Mr. Tate died, they were able to take Corrinne with them.

~*~

Not that it was any real consolation to Derek, who’d already lost Cora just south of the border.

The day after Braden and the Tates’ funerals, Stiles led Derek and Isaac to Scott’s grave — only to find Liam already there.

It turned out that the ‘blue eyes for lost innocence’ thing was probably just some bullshit some Hunters must’ve made up somewhere along the line to justify killing more werewolves. Either some werewolves believed it by mistake, or Peter was an even bigger dick than they’d thought for spreading this lie around.

When a werewolf — a real werewolf, anyway — killed someone, it didn’t matter how innocent or guilty that person was.

Kate Argent was quite possibly the least innocent person on the planet, yet Isaac’s eyes still glowed blue as he snarled down at this beta he’d never met, but who’d taken Scott away from him.

Kneeling on the cold grass, Liam tore his gaze away from Scott’s grave, and breathed out a quiet, “ _…oh…_ ” when he saw Scott’s last remaining betas there.

 _His_ last remaining betas there.

Swallowing, Liam’s eyes glowed red — and Isaac’s snarl descended into a low, dangerous growl…until Liam tilted his head, baring his throat to Derek.

“Please,” he murmured. Derek shook his head with a low, dangerous chuckle, and Liam snarled. “Come on! You know you want to!”

“Oh, I do,” Derek answered, his own eyes blazing blue. “But we both know that’s not what Scott would have wanted.”

Stiles sighed as, predictably, Liam started crying again.

“Well it doesn’t matter what Scott wanted!” Liam cried out. “Because he’s dead! He’s not here, and that’s because of _me_!”

“Yup,” Derek said, with a sharp smile Stiles hadn’t seen since the months just after Laura’s death. “And now you have to live with it.”

Liam froze, before his expression started to relax.

Stiles would spend the rest of his short little life kicking himself for not recognizing that look on Liam’s face sooner.

He should have. He’d seen that expression in the mirror often enough, that desperation coupled with not just zero, but _negative_ will to live.

He should have known Liam would launch himself at Derek, he should have known that Liam would attack Derek, he should have known that Liam would force Derek into a kill or be killed position.

He should have known what guilt would drive Liam to do.

Later, at Liam’s funeral, watching the coffin descend into the grave as Derek clenched his jaw to hide the flickering red in his eyes, Stiles wondered if maybe some small part of him _had_ known — and he just hadn’t cared.

Hadn’t that been what Theo wanted? Void Stiles?

The nogitsune couldn’t come back, but the void was still waiting to swallow Stiles whole.

Maybe it already had, and he just hadn’t noticed.

In Stiles’ defense, with La Bete running around, it was hard to notice _anything_.

Hell, it took almost a month for them to realize Mason was missing. After all, the boy genius had lost his love of the supernatural world when he realized just how ‘intense’ it was.

The last time Stiles had seen Mason had been over Hayden’s body, her neck snapped by Theo in a mercy kill as her body soaked in black and silver blood.

Mason’s shirt had still been covered in _Scott’s_ blood when he turned his back on Liam and walked away.

Too bad that just because he turned his back on the supernatural, didn’t mean the supernatural would turn its back on him.

“You’re telling me _Mason_ is The Beast?” Jordan demanded, staring helplessly between Chris and Derek in the dim bunker.

Behind them, Stiles nodded. In the corner of the room, Isaac snorted — though he didn’t look away from Gerard, on whom he had a gun trained.

Gerard was tending to his slashed shoulder and face with a meager first aid kit. Isaac had lashed out at Gerard for his one attempt at a smarmy remark about Allison’s ‘pet’ learning a Hunter’s weapon.

Derek had just drawled that Gerard might be useful, which was the only reason Gerard was still alive, jaw clenched as he dabbed at his face in between mutinous glares at Chris, who’d smiled approvingly at Isaac.

Jordan would probably have been more disturbed by the sight if Lydia hadn’t told him all about Gerard just before the man had taken a blowtorch to his eye.

“And we don’t know much else,” Lydia admitted.

“Looks like Sebastian killed the Dread Doctors,” Stiles continued. “Ripped them apart — the pair of heads were the biggest pieces we could find.”

“So between them and Theo, anyone who knew anything about The Beast or the chimeras is dead,” Derek summarized, crossing his arms in frustration. In the dim Argent bunker, even the faintest flicker of red in his eyes shone bright.

“The lab was smashed to hell by the time we found it,” Isaac reported, still not looking away from Gerard. “And whatever it was they’d had floating in that tank for their longevity juice, had broken out.”

Kira frowned. “What _was_ in there?”

“We’re not sure about that, either,” Lydia ground out.

They found out, soon enough.

“Seriously?” Stiles hissed, watching from where he was crouched by the school sign, as what he _thought_ was Mr. Douglas launched himself at the Beast. “We’re dealing with undead Nazi werewolves, now?”

Turning away from the sight of the man with glowing green eyes — wait, green? — throwing himself at La Bete, Derek said, “Bigger problems, Stiles.”

“I can’t believe we have bigger problems than undead Nazi werewolves,” Stiles muttered.

Though he had to concede just how much bigger this problem was when he saw Mr. Douglas’ head thrown across the lacrosse field — while the rest of the body just dropped down in the parking lot.

“Much bigger,” Derek murmured, and ushered Stiles down the secret path to the vault, as Isaac twisted the claw lock to seal it shut behind them before the Beast could see.

Stiles frowned in the dim light as Isaac followed them. “I thought only Hales could lock and unlock that?”

“I thought so, too,” Derek admitted, handing Stiles a water-bottle from the pile beside Lydia, who was skimming through the Hales’ supernatural records. “That’s what my mom always told me. Apparently, she just meant that she only allowed our pack and family down here, not that we were the only ones who could get down here. Any shape-shifter claws will work.” With a sigh, he looked to Isaac and added, “Which is good, since soon you might be the only one left.”

Isaac glared. “That’s not funny,” he insisted.

Three months, a hundred dead bodies, a missing pike, and a dozen funerals later, and it really, really wasn’t.

There wasn’t even anyone left to bury Mason’s meager remains, once they finally killed the Beast, as Sebastian had ripped apart the whole Hewitt family.

All the local funeral businesses were working overtime. But some of the cemetery workers still remembered Isaac from his grave-digging days, so they’d snuck in a short, quick service for him — and Jordan too, as a favor to their memory of Isaac.

Not that it took much sneaking. Stiles, Lydia, Kira, Melissa, and Chris were the only people _left_ to attend their service.

With hundreds of grieving, angry humans in Beacon Hills, they’d had to bury Derek and Ethan in secret, out by the old Hale House ruins. Derek got to be with his family, now.

“And Ethan can be with Aiden again,” Jackson choked out, laying down the wolfsbane rope spiral with shaking hands and shining eyes, alpha red flickering like a dying ember.

When Jackson stood up, Deucalion wrapped a supportive hand around Jackson’s shoulder.

“I once wanted this _so bad_ ,” Jackson murmured, staring down at his clawed hands, red fading out of his eyes. “And hated Scott for it. And now…god, I hate that I’m an alpha, that I have _his_ spark, that he isn’t…that _I_ …”

“You’re not the only one,” Stiles grumbled.

“You can only do your best,” Deucalion said. “And as long as you do your best, Scott would be proud of you.”

“They all would,” Kira said.

Even as he slumped into Lydia’s embrace, Jackson didn’t look like he believed them.

~*~

Gerard armed all the angry humans in town with both weapons and knowledge, so it wasn’t long before Jackson was cornered in the distillery.

Tears fell from Lydia’s eyes, but otherwise her face was blank as the video started. Stiles just wished the McCall living room wasn’t so _suffocating_.

Monroe had smartly kept her face off camera, but with the sheer number of police who were on her side, she hadn’t bothered disguising her voice.

Those sick bastards had somehow found the bodies in the woods, and the wolfsbane rope they’d dug up from Ethan’s grave was now being used to tie Jackson down — not that it was needed much, given the wires connecting Jackson to the car battery. On screen, Jackson writhed in front of the spiral Ennis had carved into the sheetmetal wall so long ago.

Deucalion’s body, slumped against the wall, cut a horrifying silhouette into the moonlit spiral, head tilted aside — and no one had even closed his eyes for him. If it weren’t for the bullet-hole in his forehead and all the black blood soaking his shirt, he could’ve been silently watching Jackson.

“In _your_ world,” Monroe spat out off-camera. “This symbol means revenge. How many innocent people have you killed? How many have died just because of you? How many lives have been ‘sacrificed’ just to uphold your lies?”

Over Stiles’ shoulder, Kira whimpered.

“No more,” Monroe said. “We Hunt those who Hunt us. We avenge those who cannot avenge themselves.”

Chris sobbed at this bastardization of Allison’s legacy, and Melissa flinched at the tinny gun-shot that sounded when a Hunter put a wolfsbane bullet in Jackson’s head.

Scott’s alpha spark died in the same place it had been born.

“They’re going to _pay_ for this,” Rafael promised, and then a week later they were burying him, too.

Or rather, they would have buried him, but they were on the run.

“I hope this works,” Stiles murmured, as they slunk into the school basement. With a grimace, he pulled the little velvet dice bag out of his pocket, and pulled on the specially made glove inside it.

“It should,” Lydia insisted.

“This better work, Ethan,” he muttered, and handed the glove with Derek’s claws on the ends to Kira. A little bit of electricity and foxfire started to spark again, and she stared at the claws until they almost seemed to glow on her finger tips.

They all breathed a sigh of relief when the Hale Vault still opened for them.

“I guess Derek’s not done protecting us, yet,” Lydia said, with a soft, watery smile.

There were only two sleeping bags beside the pile of emergency rations Chris and Derek had managed to smuggle here from the Argent bunker so long ago. Kira conked out in the smaller one. On the larger one, Chris and Melissa wrapped themselves around each other as tightly as they could, and tried to grab a bit of rest.

Stiles found the can of gasoline, and was ready to head back out when Lydia appeared.

That slight head tilt, coupled with the glazed look in her eyes, promised nothing good as she followed him.

“What do you hear?” he whispered, as they inched their way out of the school. This late at night, and months after the school had closed down for good, there was no one left to patrol it regularly.

But even without them, that didn’t mean it was completely abandoned.

“Hooves,” she murmured. “Like horses galloping. And something jingling — maybe some bells?”

Stiles frowned. Was someone going to get trampled to death by a parade horse?

Whatever. He didn’t see any horses or Hunters around, so with the coast clear, they shot across the school parking lot. They’d already made sure to leave a set of faint footprints walking away from both the jeep and the school, and sprayed some sweat and blood in that direction to misdirect any hunting dogs Monroe and her people had with them.

Now, Stiles and Lydia just needed to convince the Hunters that they _would_ abandon the jeep and were running on foot in the woods.

Stiles’ hands shook as he slashed the tires on his mother’s jeep, and opened the can of gasoline.

He was just about to start pouring it out over the seats when Lydia shrieked, and Stiles turned to see…

“…hello?” he said to the weird…men?…standing there in long coats with pistols, staring at them.

At _him_.

Or at least he thought it was staring. Its face looked like it was carved out of bark, and it had eye holes but didn’t seem to have eyes.

“Nice cowboy outfit,” Stiles tried, dropping the can. “Lydia, _run_.”

She didn’t.

Instead, she _screamed_.

At such close range, the creepy coybow carving dude right in front of her just _exploded_. It was made of the same wood on the inside as it was on the outside, if the spray of bark chips that results from the blast of Lydia’s supersonic scream was anything to go by.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t alone. Stiles wished he’d brought the assault rifle, but he had only his dad’s gun to try and fight off the crazy cosplay cowboys, whose guns and whips _glowed_ a familiar shade of green.

“I don’t suppose you know an undead Nazi werewolf?” Stiles tried, just before one tried to shoot him again. Lydia blasted that one away, too — taking the jeep’s windshield with it in her scream.

Unfortunately, there were only two of them, and almost a dozen of these dudes, and the last of Lydia’s screams that Stiles heard wasn’t her weapon or her warning, but her grief when he was taken away.

~*~

So it turned out Ghost Riders were a thing, but instead of cute little fairies, they were creepy carving cowboys.

“I think the carving aesthetic is somehow connected to the Nemeton,” Peter said, as they looked around the Waystation.

Stiles paused in his musing. “Maybe they’re _made_ out of the Nemeton? Or like, _a_ Nemeton?”

Peter was staring up at the notice-board with its list of weird places around the world, and slowly nodded.

“I think,” he murmured. “They are made of defunct or dead Nemetons.”

“But ours was cut down decades ago,” Stiles said, with a frown.

“The _tree_ was cut down decades ago,” Peter said. “But the actual power took a while to fade — and between Jennifer’s sacrifices, as well as…” He frowned, looking around at all the blank faces surrounding them in the waiting area benches. Then his eyes widened. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Stiles demanded. “What ‘oh’?”

“You didn’t just charge up the Nemeton,” he said. “You became a part of it, and it a part of you. The Ghost Riders are feeding off of its remains, and you…” Peter shook his head, laughing. “That must be why you remembered, and why you are impervious to their spell.” He waved his arms at all the blank faces around him. “I imagine that anyone you interact with will respond to you, and that if you leave me long enough, I’ll fall back under the spell, too.”

“Okay,” Stiles said, with a slow nod, trying to figure out what this all meant so he could _get the hell out of here_. “And they steal other people’s memories of us.”

Peter nodded, looking like his conniving old self again, as if Eichen House never happened. “And even a human can be bonded into a pack, and sometimes you are just too big of a part of someone’s life for your absence to go unnoticed.” He smirked at Stiles. “I imagine Scott is already starting to notice the gaps in his memory, hm?”

Stiles froze.

Shit.

Peter had broken out during _their_ break-out of Lydia — and it’s not like anyone had been in contact with him before that.

“Stiles?” Peter asked with a frown.

“Scott’s…Scott’s dead,” Stiles reported. No matter how many times’ he’d had to let someone know about it in the last half a year, it still felt like he was punching his own heart every time he said the words.

Peter’s eyes widened. “Well, I’m sure Malia-”

“Is dead too,” Stiles murmured. “The only people left to remember me are Chris, Melissa, Kira, and Lydia.”

Narrowing his eyes, Peter said, “No — I know he’s in South America, but Derek-”

“We buried him by the Hale House,” Stiles said dully, all the deaths of the last few months coming back at once. “Next to Laura.”

Peter stared.

“Cora tried to fight Kate,” Stiles continued. “Her…her death pissed off Isaac enough that he was finally able to kill Kate for good.”

“Are you saying…” Peter growled, even as he backed away from Stiles. “ _I_ am the last Hale?”

Stiles slowly nodded, and he knew in that moment that he was going to be on his own if he wanted to get out of the Waystation.

The first and last time Stiles ever saw regret on Peter’s face was when he retook his seat on the Ghost Riders’ waiting bench.

Stiles blamed Peter for a lot of things, but not for this. He just turned away and started down the tunnel he’d missed during his first scan of the Waystation.

Jumping onto the back of a Ghost Rider’s horse had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Right up until the keys clipped to his belt-loop got loose from his pocket.

It wasn’t _bells_ Lydia had heard jingling alongside the sound of hooves, but _keys_.

Stiles would’ve laughed, except then the portal opened with him going through it, and he lost all awareness except for the green light in his eyes and his entire body burning.

He screamed and screamed and somewhere in the distance heard the sound of Lydia screaming into the ether as his world darkened.

~*~

And then he woke up.

He groaned, because goddamn his head hurt. But he sighed in relief when he realized he was draped across the front seats of his jeep. Huh, it must’ve worked. Dimensional travel, makes sense that he would reappear right where he was taken from…

…except they destroyed the jeep. If Lydia followed the plan, the jeep probably wouldn’t be in the parking lot by now, and it would be little more than a burnt out husk.

And even if she hadn’t, she’d broken the windshield — so why wasn’t Stiles covered in glass shards? And shouldn’t he at least smell some gasoline from the dropped can?

Maybe someone took the jeep and repaired it? But if that were the case, why didn’t the Ghost Rider portal dump him in the parking lot where he was taken? Why would it drop him at…he pushed himself up to see where he was-

-and froze at the sight of his own house.

Okay, forget why the Ghost Riders would drop him off here — who the hell repaired his jeep and brought it back _here_?

He slumped back in his seat, wrapping his hands around the steering wheel and trying to take a deep, calming breath.

Stiles hadn’t been here in months. Without dad to pay the mortgage, he’d had to foreclose the house. By the time Derek had offered to just buy it back, all the Hunters knew the address and it was too dangerous to even be seen in the same neighborhood.

And now he was back, in his own extremely visible jeep that everyone knew belonged to him. Damnit. How long was he even gone? How long did he have before a Hunter found him? Did his phone make it through the Ghost Rider portal?

He sighed again, praying that Chris and the ladies were still in the Hale Vault, or at least left a message of some kind. He reached up, running his hand through his hair in frustration-

-and froze again when instead of his fingers sliding into the gelled spikes he’d had five minutes ago, his palm brushed over a buzzcut he hadn’t had in years.

With a sharp, rasping breath, he scrambled for the rearview mirror, almost yanking it off when he pulled it toward him.

He looked _young_. He was wearing a shirt he’d lost ages ago, a jacket he hadn’t seen in months, and there were no bags under his eyes.

What the…was he back in Bardo again? Why would he be in his jeep and look a few years younger, though?

Was that psychotic magical tree stump just messing with him again?

He started to pat himself down, before frowning at the body he felt under his hands. He never became a gym rat or got the kind of muscle the werewolves did, but he still worked out a decent amount and got into shape.

With his life, being out of shape could be deadly.

He wasn’t statuesque, but he’d built up a decent amount of muscle — most of which was now gone. The hell?

Frowning, he found…his old phone?

He damn near swallowed his tongue when he saw the date on it.

This was over two years ago, what — was this Bardo? The Nemeton?

Some cruel afterlife?

He frowned. When exactly was this? He pulled up the calendar, trying to figure out what was happening around this time, because if this was another freaky Nemeton vision…

…then why had it sent him back to the middle of sophomore year? School hadn’t even started back up yet, what was he doing the night before winter semester-

Oh.

He swallowed, and looked at the time. Was it too late? Goddamn, that was two years, what time had he gone out to grab Scott? When had they come back? He didn’t know.

But then the message alert chimed with a new text.

From his _dad_.

It was a benign message, one they’d exchanged hundreds of times over the years.

But the simple, _‘are ya home yet?’_ broke Stiles’ heart.

He whimpered as both implications slammed into him at once.

His dad was alive.

His dad was alive, but it was too late to stop himself from going out there, to stop _Scott_ from going out there.

Scott said he’d been Bitten almost right after Stiles had been caught by his dad. So if Stiles was already home…

It was too late to save Scott.

He shuddered as he stared at the message.

Maybe this was just some kind of sick nightmare that was only a step removed from the nightmare of his waking hours. Maybe he was still back in the Ghost Riders’ Waystation, and he wasn’t being taunted with the biggest failure of his entire life, or he was dead and the Nemeton was pissed at him. Maybe this was all just a dream.

Maybe it wasn’t.

With shaking hands, it took him three tries just to type out, _‘yeah’_ and send it.

Only then did he count his fingers.

Five on each hand, ten total. No more, no less.

Stiles swore, staring at his traitorous, shaking hands.

These hands hadn’t ever put together a bomb. These hands hadn’t tortured anybody. These hands hadn’t been covered in blood at all, let alone the blood of someone he’d just killed.

These hands just picked up a flashlight and dragged his best friend out into the woods in the middle of the night, sending them careening down the road to hell.

He looked down at his lap.

These hands could also pick up the phone and call his dad, right now.

Could Stiles handle it?

Did he have a choice?

He was tapping on an outdated little green phone icon before he could think about it anymore.

“ _Stiles?_ ” dad answered, and Stiles shoved his fist into his mouth so that his dad couldn’t hear him bursting into tears. “ _Stiles, I just got your text, you said you’re back home?_ ”

“Y-yeah,” Stiles said, cursing the waver in his voice.

Dad immediately caught it, asking softly, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Stiles said, scrambling for some answer. God, Stiles hadn’t even known about the supernatural back then — back now? — so Dad definitely didn’t, so…what was Stiles supposed to say? What had he usually said back then? Or rather, what did he say now? “I’m fine, how are you?” he blurted out.

Well, close enough, because Dad just sighed. But it was a long-suffering sound of exasperation, not exhaustion, not the bone-deep weariness of helplessness in the face of the supernatural, not the exhaustion of always being terrified of the call about yet another dead body.

Not yet.

“I’m fine,” Dad said. “And I’m guessing Scott is, since we haven’t found him yet.”

Shit, where had Stiles said Scott was two years ago? Wait, no where, he’d said Scott wasn’t there at all. Had Dad believed him? Not that it’d mattered within a few days because they’d dug up Laura anyway, but that hasn’t happened yet and wait, was Peter still out there? Derek? Who else?

“Of course not, Scott wasn’t with me,” Stiles futilely insisted again.

“Uh-huh,” Dad said, with a dry chuckle. “Go to bed, don’t wanna be late for your first day back to school.”

“I don’t?”

Dad groaned and hung up.

Stiles stared at the phone, dumb-founded, because Dad hadn’t said anything.

And why would he? Stiles’ life hadn’t been in danger, back then, back _now_. The biggest threat to Stiles’ life was when he went out into the woods when he shouldn’t have been, and now Stiles was already removed from that danger.

Dad hadn’t needed to say anything because Stiles was fine, because he hadn’t been sacrificed to the Nemeton yet, nor possessed by a demonic fox spirit, nor caught in the crossfire of multiple assassins, nor-

Nor chasing down Dread Doctors or investigating a duplicitous ‘werewolf’ that was just too good to be true, that was all of Scott’s weaknesses packed into one person, that turned out to be a chimera and a liar and a murderer.

Everything was fine, no one’s life was in danger, so Dad didn’t have to tell Stiles that he loved him or to stay safe or-

Well, back then, that’s what they had ‘go to bed’ for.

With a whimper, Stiles climbed out of his jeep and listened to his dad, making straight for bed.

It was too late to save Scott from being a werewolf, but there were a lot more and nastier things out there that Stiles could save Scott from, Scott and everyone else. He didn’t know how he ended up in the past — hell, he still wasn’t sure if this was real or some Nemeton psychological torture or crazy vision or what — but if he was here now, he was gonna make the most of it.

He paused in the doorway, then turned back to look at the jeep in the driveway.

It hadn’t been to a cartel down in Mexico, or La Iglesia. It hadn’t been flipped over by a lunatic hellhound. It hadn’t been to Shiprock.

He’d last seen it with slashed tires, all the walls dinged from bullets, and the windshield broken in from Lydia’s supersonic scream.

Compared to all of that, it looked almost pristine, now.

He couldn’t save Scott from everything — and given what he’d learned over the months and years to come, it wasn’t just Scott. Allison’s family were Hunters that would’ve sucked her into their twisted cause no matter what, Lydia’s grandmother was a banshee, and Kira was born a fox. Laura had already been murdered, leaving Derek all alone, and Malia was a coyote even now.

There was a lot he couldn’t save his friends from.

But there was even more he _could_.

~*~

“Scott, buddy,” Stiles said. He wrapped his hands tight around the straps of his backpack, desperately trying to anchor himself in this insane present. Of course Scott wouldn’t know anything beyond the night he died — how could he? He shook his head in the face of this latest insanity of their lives. “That wasn’t last night. That was months ago. You died half a year ago.”

Stiles’ alpha…except no, Scott was only _just_ bitten, he was only a beta, and barely one at that.

But no matter what species or status Scott had been, there was one thing that had always remained.

Stiles’ best friend stared at Stiles in stunned disbelief.

Then, because they were best friends, because they’d been brothers in all but blood or law _long_ before the supernatural world ripped their lives apart, Scott launched forward, wrapping his arms around Stiles in a wordless cry.

“Scott, I’m so sorry,” Stiles murmured, six months of ruminating on what he wished he could’ve said to Scott pouring in all at once. “I know I should’ve told you about Donovan, I messed up so bad and you _died_ for it and Dad died and everything went to hell-”

“No, no-” Scott squeezed him tight, then suddenly pulled back. “Wait, what? What happened to your dad? Who else died?”

Stiled opened his mouth to answer, but instead started to laugh, a cold and harsh noise that made Scott visibly nervous, yet Stiles just couldn’t stop.

“Who…” He shook his head. “Who _didn’t_ die, Scott? God…my dad died, and Lydia was in Eichen House so we had to break her out and we got her out but Malia was killed in the process, and then Derek and Isaac got here and Liam basically used Derek to commit suicide by cop because he felt so guilty about killing you-”

“Killing me?” Scott asked, bewildered.

Stiles frowned. “Yeah, Liam — for you, he killed you last night, right?”

Now it was Scott’s turn to slowly shake his head. “He tried, and he nearly did — but Theo killed me in the end,. Liam was already gone by then.”

…what?

Stiles didn’t even need to say that outloud because Scott groaned. “Liam didn’t kill me,” Scott repeated. “He wanted me dead, and he tried — but he didn’t actually kill me. Theo did, and Theo manipulated him on a full moon, on a _supermoon_ , and…Stiles?”

Scott reached up to wrap his hand around Stiles’ neck in confused reassurance, a practiced gesture that wouldn’t do anything now that Scott wasn’t an alpha anymore — wasn’t even fully a werewolf yet — but grounded Stiles nonetheless.

“Liam wanted you dead, and you would’ve still been alive if it weren’t for him,” Stiles insisted, because that was how it worked. Or at least that was how it _should_ work, right?

“Yeah,” Scott said with a slow nod. “And Liam _did_ try to kill me, I’m not forgetting that. But — it sounds like you’ve had the facts a little off for a while, because the truth matters too. Theo killed me, not Liam.”

Scott blurred in Stiles’ vision, and the tears hadn’t even started falling before Scott wrapped Stiles in a tight hug again.

“Stiles?” Scott asked.

“I didn’t…I wanted him dead,” Stiles said, and Scott pulled away, frowning in confusion. “Donovan. I wanted him dead, and he died, and I didn’t mean to kill him, but…but…”

Scott’s face darkened, and Stiles’ heart started pounding and could Scott even hear that yet?

Except Scott wasn’t angry at _Stiles_.

“Theo told me you beat Donovan’s head in with the wrench,” Scott said, voice low like he was trying to growl — by this time tomorrow, it _would_ be a growl, but not yet, because Scott was just Bitten only a few hours ago and holy shit, how was the transformation even supposed to work this time?

Wait — Theo told him _what_?!

“He said…” Stiles swallowed, and Scott nodded.

“Yeah, and then…I asked you and you said…”

Stiles shut his eyes. “Goddamn that asshole. Beheading was too nice for him.”

“Beheading?!” Scott yelped.

Stiles winced. “Um. Kira gave your mom his head in a box?”

Scott looked downright scandalized, and that was just so inappropriate for the magnitude of his own death and the vengeance thereof that Stiles burst out laughing. He doubled over, and laughter really was infection because Scott started chuckling, too.

“What _happened_ to us?” Scott asked, when their laughter faded away.

Stiles didn’t even answer, he just looked down at Scott’s side, where Peter’s Bite was already healing underneath his sweater.

“Yeah,” Scott mumbled, following his gaze. “That and…everything else.”

“Everyone _one_ else,” Stiles said, nodding over Scott’s shoulder at the strawberry redheaded goddess walking up the sidewalk toward the school’s entrance. And of course, all the way back then, Lydia didn’t even know Scott’s name — possibly not even Stiles’ name — and had no reason to care about them…

…yet she actually looked over at them.

Was it just because they were the two crazy boys who’d been laughing hysterically for no good reason?

Or was it something more?

“Lydia,” he greeted, trying for the same cheer he vaguely remembered he’d always used to direct at her.

“Stiles, right?” she said as she walked over, voice far friendlier than it’d ever been before the Winter Formal of sophomore year. “And Scott? Did-” She paused oddly. “Did I get your names right?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said slowly. “Not like it’s hard, we’ve been going to school together since third grade.”

Lydia winced, and that sealed the deal, because up until she became the town lunatic after Peter’s assault, Lydia had never given two shits about them.

“And, you know, fought off some psycho werewolves, evil Hunters, and crazy Druids and Doctors together,” Scott said casually.

Lydia froze.

For a moment, Stiles wondered if they miscalculated. Lydia _had_ always tried to be friendly to new kids, maybe she just really hadn’t known them and thought they were new and now they’d just convinced her they were crazy-

Her face broke out into one of her biggest grins Stiles had ever seen in his life, eyes shining as her gloved hands clasped in front of her chest.

“I can’t believe it!” she cried out, practically throwing herself at them as she wrapped them both in a tight hug. “It worked!”

“… _what_ worked?!”


	4. Lydia Martin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much to [Escalus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escalus) for betaing this chapter on very short notice! ♥

Lydia used to think of Beacon Hills as a quiet town, but the home she knew was a cacophony compared to the silence _now_ , as Kira drove them to the hospital.

The Camaro was never a particularly quiet car to begin with, but now the engine thundered in the empty streets they drove through.

“Red light,” Lydia mumbled, as they approached an intersection.

Kira drove right through it. “It’s not like there’s anyone left to ticket us.”

“M’kay,” Lydia said, blinking when Kira suddenly shook her shoulder.

“No, no, no, Lydia, you promised, don’t fall asleep!” Kira never took her eyes off the empty road but did keep glancing at Lydia. “You need to stay awake, you need to talk me through how to help you!”

Now Lydia sighed as she slumped into her seat, but she nodded. Looking down, she winced.

“Derek would kill me for getting blood all over his seats like this,” she said.

Kira choked on a laugh that sounded suspiciously close to a sob. “Almost there, Lydia, please, just _stay with me_.”

She did. Despite how much it hurt, this was hardly the first time Lydia had dealt with a bleeding gash in her side. At least it wasn’t a stab wound — with no doctors or nurses left in Beacon Hills, Lydia would’ve been dead if the Anuk-Ite had better aim.

But it didn’t, and Kira and Lydia did, and now it was dead.

Too little, too late.

“You sure this is gonna work?” Kira asked, sliding into the hospital parking lot and pulling up to a haphazard halt in front of the main ER doors.

“Not even remotely,” Lydia admitted, struggling to get her door open and frowning when Kira was just _there_. When had she even gotten out of the car? And when had she gotten her hands on a wheelchair?

“M’losing time,” Lydia complained, as the automatic doors slid open for them despite no one manning the ER.

The only people there were already dead. Kira maneuvered Lydia deftly around the bodies, only stopping to grab the supplies Lydia pointed out. The only other sounds were of medical supplies and bullet casings being kicked aside as they made their way down the hall.

“Melissa would be so pissed at this mess,” Lydia said, as the elevator doors closed on the gruesome sight of the blood-drenched hallway.

“Melissa?” Kira asked, with that same confusion that still broke Lydia’s heart every time. “I thought you said she was Scott’s mom? What does she have to do with the hospital?”

Some days, Lydia hated that she was able to resist the Ghost Riders’ memory manipulation, that she remembered their last few friends that Kira had forgotten.

“She was a nurse here,” Lydia reminded her. “S’how…” She swallowed and tried again as the elevator doors opened again. “How I got the idea. Ghost Riders only take the living — maybe we can hide among the dead.”

It was a stupid plan, but it was all she had.

Kira froze just outside the morgue. “There’s someone in there,” she said, pulling off her belt and snapping it into a sword. “Wait here.”

Lydia whimpered, trying to push herself out of the chair, because she was the only back-up Kira had now. She hadn’t lost _that_ much blood.

Still, whoever was inside must not have been waiting to ambush them — Kira paused in the doorway.

“…Gabe,” she greeted.

Lydia hissed at the name. Kira frowned, but didn’t look away for several more moments. Lydia heard the familiar voice, one which made her want to jump up and scream his skull off, but Kira eventually lowered her sword and came back for Lydia.

“I don’t think he’ll hurt us,” Kira insisted as she pushed Lydia in.

“Of course not,” Lydia said with a scowl, glaring at Gabe even as Kira closed the morgue doors behind them. “Not like either of you remember who he hit when he shot up the McCall house.”

Monroe’s favorite little soldier boy frowned from his position on the other side of the morgue. His assault rifle was lowered toward the ground, but he wasn’t letting go of it completely.

Gabe looked at her in suspicious confusion.

“You didn’t kill Chris,” Lydia explained bitterly. “Ghost Riders only take the living, after all. You just made him and Melissa easy targets for them.”

“It’s why we’re here,” Kira continued, pointing to the haphazard pile of medical supplies in Lydia’s lap to placate him. “I just need to patch her up, and we’ll be on our way.”

Gabe nodded, finally letting his rifle drop down to his side.

He didn’t move, though, and as Kira wheeled Lydia over to the only empty examination table, Lydia could see why. She hissed at the mess of blood and pus that covered Gabe’s leg.

She wasn’t as strong as Allison, or as compassionate as Scott. She couldn’t just help someone who’d hurt her and her loved ones so badly, not like they could.

Nor was Lydia as ruthless as Stiles to take advantage of Gabe’s injury and weakness. Kira might’ve been, but since she didn’t remember Melissa or Chris, she didn’t remember the entirety of what Gabe had done to them before Monroe’s Hunters started turning on each other in demon-fueled rage.

“You need help,” Lydia stated, because he did, but she wasn’t sure if _she_ could help.

Gabe laughed, cold and bitter.

“Aren’t you a death psychic or something?” Gabe asked, the bright morgue lamps making his eyes shine in the dimness. “I think we both know I’m beyond help.”

Lydia swallowed and didn’t answer.

She _did_ know.

Gabe neither left nor attacked them, just watched as Kira peeled off the shredded remains of Lydia’s shirt. With Lydia’s guidance, Kira cleaned up the gash across Lydia’s stomach, stitched it up as best as she could, and wrapped it up tight again after disinfecting the entire area.

Not that it mattered much. If Lydia’s plan worked, all of this would be moot in just a few hours’ time.

“…I didn’t know you could get hurt.”

Gabe’s murmur almost echoed in the empty morgue.

Lydia frowned at Gabe. “Really?” she snapped. “You’ve been hunting and killing every supernatural in town even though you didn’t think you could hurt us?”

Scowling, Gabe shook his head. “No, I mean — don’t you guys heal? That’s how we tested…” He waved his hand, showing off the scar across his palm.

He flinched at Lydia’s snort of derision, even as Kira explained, “Some of us heal. Not all of us. And none of us are immortal — we can all get hurt and get killed.”

Gabe swallowed, looking down at his leg.

“Too late,” Lydia said with the sharpest smile she could muster. “You guys have already killed all the people who could have Turned you.”

With a clenched jaw, Gabe turned sharply away, and went back to a stool in the corner by the body lockers. That must’ve been where he’d been sitting when Kira came in.

Kira helped Lydia back into the new shirt they’d filched from an abandoned Macy’s, and Lydia faintly marveled at how low all of them have fallen. She still didn’t like Gabe, but when she saw the sympathetic look in Kira’s eye, she said nothing about it.

“It wasn’t entirely you,” Kira offered the boy, as Lydia corralled the miscellaneous bandages, needles, and sanitizers. “All that hate, and fear, and anger — it was real, but it blown way out of proportion by a monster, something even we had to hunt down. Did you see all those weird pieces of rock all over town and the hospital? That looked like broken statues?”

Gabe narrowed his eyes. “Those are people,” he said. “I saw one in action. She looked right into the red guy’s eyes and…”

“So now you know what it feels like to be _hunted_ ,” Lydia muttered, and didn’t care that much when Gabe flinched.

“What did you mean…” Gabe shifted on his stool. “When you said ‘that’s why you’re here’?”

“Have you noticed any gaps in your memories?” Lydia asked. “Of people? Remember any times where you don’t remember who someone was talking to, or why you were at some place, or who you were with?”

With a very slow nod, Gabe asked, “This have anything to do with the glowing cowboys?”

“It has exactly to do with them,” Lydia said. “They only take the living. We hoped that taking a break in the highest concentration of dead bodies outside of a cemetery would help hide us.” Then she frowned, looking around and thinking about the sheer emptiness of the hospital, save for all the bodies and dust. “Why are _you_ here?”

With a wane smile, Gabe pointed down at his injured leg. “Where else should I go?” With a shrug, he added, “Besides, I just figured…Nolan was always so scared. I didn’t want him to be alone.” He tapped the morgue locker door closest to him.

Oh.

Kira looked down critically at his leg. “Maybe with some anti-biotics,” she tried, sounding oddly desperate to help the guy who tried to put a bullet in her head at least twice in the last few months. “A-and we can grab some surgical supplies, and…”

She trailed off as she realized Gabe and Lydia were both shaking their heads.

The only hope Gabe could’ve possibly had at survival was amputating his leg — which was far beyond anything Kira or Lydia could handle.

And even that was only a slim chance at best. If the infection made it past his leg…

“But thanks,” Gabe murmured. He took a deep breath, and pulled up his rifle again. Despite Lydia and Kira’s flinch, he didn’t seem to notice, nor did he point it at them. He just cuddled it to his chest, leaning back into his corner.

~*~

That night, as Kira and Lydia slunk out of the hospital with only the full moon to light their way, Lydia stopped just outside the car and _screamed_.

It was the closest Gabe would have to anyone mourning him.

~*~

Even the Preserve seemed empty. Lydia wasn’t sure if it was just her imagination, or if their footsteps were actually _echoing_ despite the mulch and mud they were walking over.

Then again, maybe it was just because of their awkward, mismatched pace. Kira had her arm wrapped around Lydia’s waist, with one of Lydia’s arms over her shoulders for support.

“Come on,” Kira encouraged. “Just a little further…Lydia, it’s only a few more yards, I can carry you-”

“And I can _walk_ ,” Lydia insisted, despite how much she was leaning on Kira.

At least Kira was right. It felt like barely a minute later that the trees suddenly gave way to a clearing, the giant stump mocking them from the middle.

Despite her insistences earlier, Lydia let out a groan of relief as Kira eased her down onto the stump. Lydia wanted nothing more than to just lean back and take a nap, but she remained upright on her seat — her plan might work yet more likely will just kill them all, but either way she’d be getting plenty of sleep soon enough.

Staring down at the roots that had held the nogitsune imprisoned for decades, Kira swallowed. “Do you really think this could work?”

Tracing her fingers over the rings in the stump, Lydia bit her lip and said, “Honestly? Not really. It’s just the best idea I can come up with.” She looked up at her last friend left. “But if it does work-”

“I’ll find you,” Kira promised, sitting beside Lydia and leaning against her. “I’m not going to stay in New York.” She paused, lip quivering like she was suppressing tears, and asked, “If you’re right…should I tell my mom?”

Lydia winced. That was a good question. A few years ago, how _would_ Noshiko have reacted to Kira suddenly knowing all about the supernatural and Beacon Hills?

“She is…very protective,” Lydia mused. “The rest of us, the worry is that if we tried to tell our parents, they won’t believe us. For you, the worry is that they _will_ — and not let you come anywhere near this town.”

Kira frowned. “Did we…what happened, before the Wild Hunt took her? Did we fight, or…?”

With a watery smile, Lydia nodded. “Badly. You guys were screaming at each other, and then Noshiko…she was just scared, Kira, but she was so scared for you, she basically tried to kidnap you, so then you guys were _literally_ fighting each other, and then…and then…”

“Was she…was she taken by the Ghost Riders because of me?” Kira asked, wide-eyed.

Lydia slowly shook her head. “I think you _weren’t_ taken because of _her_.”

For a few moments, they just leaned against each other in silence.

Then Kira sat up again, squinting into the darkness. It didn’t take long for even Lydia to start hearing a familiar clicking and hissing accompanying heavy footsteps.

The centuries-old para-scientist came out of the trees with mechanic shuffle, merely a shell of the monster they’d known him as when he made La Bete. He still wore the coat and mask with which he’d terrorized this town for months, but both were in tatters. She could see flashes of moldy, pale skin through a crack in his helmet, while one of the lenses was missing — revealing the glassy, bloodshot eye behind it. The coat hung off his hunched frame like it was about to fall off, clinging with as tenuous a grasp as the autumn leaves had on the tree branches around them.

“…Marcel,” Lydia greeted the Surgeon curtly. She glanced up at the full moon. “Right on time.”

The remnant of a man before them tilted his head. His body almost seemed to sway with the movement, except there didn’t seem to be much movement from his cane. Under his other arm were two clumps of tubes and lens and wiring and wood — the remains of the Doctors’ helmets.

She got a sinking feeling they might’ve been pulled right off of his old colleagues’ heads, from wherever Sebastian had dropped them after ripping the other Doctors apart.

Centuries of isolation have left him without anything resembling social skills — Lydia _still_ wasn’t sure how Theo learned anything from them — so he said nothing in return, just kept shuffling forward until he was standing less than two yards away from them and from the Nemeton.

“Covenant,” he said, holding up the two cannibalized — _oh_ , terrible word choice, Martin — helmets.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “I already agreed, you don’t need to convince me.”

Kira was still frowning. “It’s…what you told us — are you _sure_ that will be enough? You guys were pretty powerful, even…”

She glanced down at her hands, foxfire simmering around them, and sparks coming from her fingertips.

The Doctors’ destabilization of her had many, many after-effects — one of which not only failed them in trying to stop the Wild Hunt, but let the Anuk-Ite escape its prison.

Marcel shuffled past them to set the clumps of time- and memory-manipulating technology on the Nemeton, Kira turning in her seat as Lydia looked over her shoulder.

One of them started sparking.

“Assistance,” Marcel droned, mechanical voice echoing between all the dying trees.

With a frown and a nose-scrunch, Kira asked, “How’s this supposed to help us?”

But Lydia was already standing, leaning her weight on the Nemeton as she moved her way around Kira.

“One flow,” Marcel continued. It took Lydia a moment to figure out what that meant — the last time she’d come across it, it had been written via a mid-century typewriter, and in old French.

The Doctors kept extensive notes, and Marcel had held none of them back when he’d made his deal with Lydia.

She examined the clumps of wood and metal and magic she and Kira were about to pin not just their own lives on, but hundreds of others too — thousands, if you counted all the people taken by the Ghost Riders.

Wood was not particularly conducive to electricity, yet the sparks seemed to keep trying to conduct through the Nemeton instead of the handy clumps of metal from the other helmet. Beside her, Marcel leaned his cane against the stump and held out two shaking hands, hands which looked like skin stretched over skeleton.

Some of the sparks continued to try and jump into the Nemeton, but some started to leap between his hands. Marcel started…no, not Marcel, his _helmet_ started to hum, and the sparks seemed to try to jump away from his hands and toward them at the same time — until they were going in a circle.

“Oh,” Lydia murmured, caught between fascinated and disgusted.

“What?” Kira asked, studying the phenomena before her with a frown — and clearly understanding none of it.

“We won’t just be _using_ the Dread Doctors’ time- and memory-manipulation,” Lydia said. Her fascination and her fury won out, a sharp grin spreading across her face. “When we go back, the Dread Doctors won’t be able to manipulate time anymore…because _we_ will have burned it all out, us and Marcel. They get it from the Wild Hunt, which we’ll be…cannibalizing.” Terrible word-choice, but most appropriate. “No more Wild Hunt — or anything _in_ it — then no more time and memory manipulation for the Doctors.”

As the implication sunk in, a dark and mischievous grin spread across Kira’s expression, too. “Good,” the kitsune said, before the girl blinked and muttered at Marcel, “No offe- …well, _some_ offense.”

Not that he seemed to take any. He pulled his hands away, the sparks gravitating back to the wood, and instead pointed at her. “Current.”

Kira swallowed and nodded. She stood up, pulling off her belt and snapping it into a sword again.

“I’m…” She looked between her sword and the center of the Nemeton. “Well, ‘ready’ might be overstating it.”

“As ready as we can ever be,” Lydia offered. Her finger tips hovered less than an inch above the rings in the wood.

She thought of the last time she saw the tattoo they inspired, before Theo trapped her in her own mind and got Liam to kill Scott. Being locked up in Eichen House at the time, she hadn’t been able to go to Scott’s funeral…though he was buried in a suit, so it’s not like she would’ve seen his pack mark, anyway.

After Eichen House, she’d never been able to stomach letting _any_ needle close to her skin, tattoo or otherwise, but she always made sure her jewelry came in twos.

Even now, Lydia wore two bracelets on her wrist — two old friendship bracelets made entirely of threads, without a hint of metal or wood to potentially interfere in their plan.

(They were also the last pieces of Allison and Malia she had.)

With a nervous nod, Kira jumped onto the tree stump, tip-toeing to the middle as if she were walking on ice.

“What does the Nemeton feel like, to you?” Lydia asked her, patting the wood.

Kira sighed, standing at the center of the stump.

“It’s like…it’s like walking on a stiff net, or really wet sand,” she said, looking down at her worn out lacrosse cleats. “I know the wood is there, but that’s not what I feel — I just feel the ley line currents, and they’re…not that stable.”

Marcel tilted his head in interest, but said nothing, instead picking up one of the wired, glassy shards and holding it out to Kira. She glared at it, but took it all the same, grimacing at how it felt as she dug it right into the center of the Nemeton.

The greenish-glassy shard pierced through the wood, and Lydia gasped as the tree started to hum, too — not just hum, but vibrate.

Kira frowned. “Do you hear something?” she asked, not letting go of the glass shard despite the matching glow between it and her finger nails.

“I think I’m hearing what you’re feeling,” Lydia said, finally letting her hand come to a rest on the tree stump.

She couldn’t _feel_ any vibration, so how was she hearing it?

Well, Kira could feel it but couldn’t hear it…

Looking down at the ancient wood, Lydia muttered, “We can’t go back far enough to save you…but we’ll make sure _nothing_ interrupts your rest, this time.”

Maybe it was just her imagination, but she could’ve sworn the humming noise smoothed out a little.

There was a hissing-click noise to her side, and Lydia watched as Marcel — holding a similar shard on the other end of the wire from the one Kira held — eased his way around the tree, his other arm up with some kind of antenna sticking out of it and changing direction as he walked. When the antenna was perfectly perpendicular to the contraption on his arm, he stopped and dug his shard into the side of the stump.

When the creepy glass cut through the bark, the vibration from the tree intensified.

“I know,” she murmured at the tree, patting the stump despite knowing the tree couldn’t feel it. It was a tree, not even an _animal_ let alone a mammal, so definitely not human enough to appreciate the gesture.

Yet the tree seemed to be angry all the same — as angry as Lydia, at the very least.

Marcel held out the helmets. Kira’s hands shook as she took one, and Lydia had to bite back tears as she took the other.

“For our pack,” Kira said, swallowing down what Lydia assumed was a tear-wrought lump in her throat as she stood, helmet in hand.

“And for Beacon Hills,” Lydia agreed, with a nod. Nodding back, Kira stood and faced the line she and Marcel just created across the radius of the Nemeton. Lydia moved until she stood exactly opposite of the Marcel, directly behind Kira. She peeled off her shoes and tossed them aside, planting each foot on a tree-root. As the Surgeon came around the tree, she faced the center Kira stood upon.

“Is there…” This man was responsible for half the deaths of her loved ones, for the terror this town had been facing, for almost everything wrong with Lydia’s life now…and he was the only way they could fix-it. “Is there anything you want me to say to your younger self, when I kill him?”

“When _we_ kill _them_ ,” Kira added, turning to look at Marcel over her shoulder.

The man went still, so still that Lydia would’ve thought he’d died on the spot if he hadn’t still been standing.

“Lie,” he finally droned out. “Sebastian is waiting.”

“Tell him…tell him Sebastian is waiting for him?” Lydia checked. The Surgeon nodded once.

“Is that even a lie?” Kira asked.

The Surgeon just nodded. If Lydia didn’t already know he didn’t have tear ducts anymore, she would’ve thought he’d been crying in that moment.

“I’ll say it,” Lydia promised.

Kira said nothing, just turning back to face where the train tracks would eventually appear. With a whimper that Lydia was sure Kira hadn’t wanted anyone to hear, the thunder kitsune pulled on the helmet, and foxfire started to flare up around her.

Almost immediately, the clouds started to gather above and around them. The cleared dimmed as they obscured the full moon. Lydia looked up until the last of its light was gone — if this failed, then this was the last time they would see their sister in the sky.

Once it vanished, the clearing might as well have been gone for all that she could see…

…until the lightning started.

First it was just a flash, and for a split second the clearing was lit up bright as day, before the darkness overtook it again as Lydia flinched from the sound. Then another flash, with the skull-ringing clap of thunder accompanying it, then another, faster and faster.

The clearing almost stayed alight in all the lightning, but Lydia could barely make sense of it with her hears and body and head all ringing from the constant thunder. She huddled over her helmet, staring incredulously at Kira who didn’t flinch or even seem to _notice_ all the lightning in the sky.

But notice it she did, right as Lydia heard…something. A voice? A sound? Something under all that lightning.

Kira lifted up her sword, and it was like a downpour of thunder crashing down on them all as she summoned all the lightning to her, to the Nemeton, to _them_.

Lydia struggled to even see Kira, as the lightning started to move away from the sky and the sword both, wrapping around her, distorting, until Lydia lost sight of the girl underneath the fox.

The tree started to spark too, and Lydia looked down at her helmet, same as the one Marcel wore, except it still had both lenses, and the entire jaw area was missing.

In front of her, the thunder fox whirled the sword around and struck it down into the tree. Lydia couldn’t see her friend at all, and wasn’t sure if Kira was even _there_ anymore.

Not that it mattered. Lydia had lost so many already, and she was just about to either lose or gain everything.

So she looked at Marcel one last time, and with a finale shared nod, she pulled on her helmet.

Then her hands froze, helmet jammed on her head, as she realized what that sound under the lightning was.

Kira was _screaming_.

No, this wasn’t — something was wrong, _what was wrong, what did Lydia do wrong?!_

But it was too late to guess. Already, looking through the lenses, she could see not just the thunder fox and the lightning, but a set of train tracks directly opposite from her, seeming to sprout from the roots of the tree and disappear into the forest, unheeding of all the trees it crossed through.

“Kira,” Lydia choked out, because this wasn’t supposed to hurt her so bad, this wasn’t-

_Don’t Stop_

That was and wasn’t Kira’s voice, Kira and someone else, Kira and a young fox who lost too much _too soon_ and refused to let it all be for vain and how the hell could Lydia possibly know all this from just two words? She didn’t have a psychic connect to Kira — a banshee and a kitsune couldn’t connect to each other without something, some _one_ bridging across the different streams of magic.

And then she realized — the helmets.

_YES_

Lydia flinched at Marcel’s confirmation, but nodded, hoping that her tears inside the helmet wouldn’t jeopardize the delicate equipment.

(Marcel had never actually said _why_ he didn’t have tear ducts anymore.)

She hated seeing her last friend alive suffer, but Lydia knew better than to take Kira’s choices away from her.

So she stood there, waiting and listening as Kira screamed with all the lightning and foxfire and energy she was bridging together. She screamed and the tree was vibrating so much, Lydia wondered if it was screaming, too.

Not that it mattered — it wasn’t long before Lydia heard the roaring sound of a train. A fiery green light in the distance started to grow as it approached.

“NOW!” the foxfire girl shouted, twisting the blade in the tree stump. The top of the Nemeton cracked across the surface, like it were made of glass instead of wood.

Lydia reached out to brace herself on the tree, but it was too late — all the lightning coalesced into a single, giant lightning bolt that struck down on Kira, and stayed right there coming out of the cracked middle of the Nemeton.

It was the last time Lydia saw her last friend in this world.

She was all alone, now — and she prayed that she wouldn’t be for much longer.

With her hands on the tree stump, fingertips digging into the cracks and Kira’s sparks reaching toward her fingernails, Lydia looked right into the lightning bolt with its path to the oncoming train, opened her mouth, and _**screamed**_.

Like the tree before her, Lydia stayed rooted — even as the lightning started to shine and spark with a green color, even as the fiery green light in the distance came closer and closer, and even as the roaring of the train overtook the thunderous noise of the lightning.

The train burst through the tree line. For a single moment, not only was the clearing lit up in fiery green lightning, the entire world was. For a single moment, Lydia could _see_ these train tracks connecting this Nemeton to all the others around the world, see the Ghost Riders’ powerful web around the planet, see the direct path between all the souls taken by them and the thin veil of power anchored to the Earth by the Nemetons. For a single moment, Lydia could see _everything_.

It was beautiful and devastating in equal measures, and it lasted less than a moment.

The train came roaring toward her, until the green headlight was all she saw through the lightning.

Then in this world, Lydia Martin knew more.

~*~

In another world, in the world before, and in the world to be, Lydia Martin woke up in her bed screaming.

It was not the wailing of a banshee, not the declaration of death, nor the supersonic weapon.

It was the cry of a scared and grieving girl, tapering off as she saw where she was.

As soon as she did, she practically leapt across her bed to her bedside table, desperate to see _when_ she was.

Yet even as she reached her phone, she knew the answer — it was hard to miss when she heard her months-dead mother call out from down the hall, “Lydia?”

Still, Lydia pressed the power button on her phone, just to be sure.

The date and time lit up, and Lydia smiled.

~*~

The next morning, that smile grew to a grin after Scott looked her in the eye and pointedly stated how they’d, “fought off some psycho werewolves, evil Hunters, and crazy Druids and Doctors together.”

It took a moment for those words to register, even spoken with Scott’s quiet confidence that took him half a dozen supernatural crises to achieve, and without dispute from this softer version of Stiles with her friend’s hardened eyes.

“I can’t believe it!” she cried out, all her plans for temporal tact going out the window the moment she realized _she wasn’t alone_. Not caring who saw, how many timeline ripples this had, she threw herself at her boys. She wrapped her arms around her emissary and her alpha, pulling them close like she’d wanted to do for months, for nearly a _year_. “It worked!”

She had her face buried in Scott’s shoulder, so she felt the movement of Stiles’ chin against her temple as he incredulously asked, “ _What_ worked?!”

Despite their mutual disbelief, they both held her close, too. For a moment, the three of them just stood there, hold each other like none of them had ever died or been taken by ancient fae conspiracies or-

“My plan,” Lydia blurted out, taking a step back.

Scott gave her a watery smile, some tension leaving his shoulders as he looked her over and saw she was okay. “W-what plan?” Scott asked, clutching onto his backpack straps like they were lifelines. Beside him, Stiles frowned in confusion, and Lydia started to answer.

“Hold up,” Stiles said, hand up and cutting her off. “I just had to tell Scott that his death last night was six months ago for me.” He swallowed, looking at Lydia. “The…the last thing I remember…well, no. The last time I saw you is when I was taken by the Ghost Riders. I died a few days after that.”

Lydia remembered reading up on why humans felt the way they did when they were about to cry. Right now, her entire sinus system was preparing for an onslaught of body fluids flowing in an atypical direction, leading to the stiffening of her arytenoid cartilage to keep her glottis open to maximize her oxygen intake to compensate for how much air she’d lose sobbing her daylights out.

“Y-you…” Lydia wanted to swallow _so bad_ , but she knew that would only make the lump-in-her-throat feeling worse. “You were taken around six months ago…but I screamed for you only five months ago. It must’ve felt like a much shorter time for you because of the Ghost Riders’ time dilation.”

“The who’s what-now?!” Scott asked, bewildered, looking between them. “What are the Ghost Riders? What happened with the Dread Doctors?” He looked at Lydia, released one hand from a backpack strap to point at Stiles, and asked, “He said Kira gave my mom Theo’s head in a box!”

Lydia couldn’t help but laugh at the bewilderment on his face.

“I heard,” she said. “I’m only sorry I didn’t get to see it for myself. Or help.” With a sharp smile as she remembered Scott’s funeral, she added, “Then again, I learned how to crush people’s skulls with my scream, so I don’t know what Kira would’ve given your mom if I’d been there when she went after Theo.”

Scott looked between her and Stiles warily. “I missed a lot, haven’t I?”

“Because you were _taken_ from us,” Lydia hissed. “Liam killed you and-”

“Liam didn’t kill him,” Stiles cut in with a wince. “Scott just said he was still alive when Liam left, and Theo had to finish the job.”

Somehow, this took even longer to process than the fact she wasn’t the only one whose mind survived the Nemetons’ angry consumption of the Wild Hunt.

“…so Derek killed Liam for _nothing_?” Lydia snapped.

“Wait, _what_?!” Scott yelled. The balance of concern and guilt in his expression was so common the last time Lydia saw him, yet so foreign to his face of over two years ago. Stiles shushed him a little when some other students looked up at the yelling — Lydia recognized one killed by the Beast — and Scott lowered his voice. “What do you mean, Derek killed Liam?”

“Derek didn’t kill Liam for _nothing_ ,” Stiles said, looking hesitantly between Scott and Lydia. “Liam goaded him into it because he felt guilty about…killing you.”

Lydia’s palm met her face in an exasperation that she _missed_ being able to feel, to express.

“Wonderful,” she muttered. “Looks like the stupid guilt complex traveled with the alpha spark.” She paused, and looked around as she realized who she’d been on her way to meet the last time around. “Guess that explains Jackson.”

Scott frowned. “Jackson…?”

“Was the last werewolf to inherit your alpha spark,” Stiles murmured. Scott froze, eyes wide and complexion pale, looking between Stiles and Lydia. “It went from you to Liam to Derek to Jackson. Him and Deucalion were killed by…” Stiles’ eyes widened. “Holy shit, Ms. Monroe is still here!”

Scott frowned in confusion. “Uh…who? The only one I can think of is the counselor-”

“ _Her!_ ” Lydia spat viciously, startling both boys. “She was the only survivor of an attack by the Beast, and Gerard radicalized her. They started a whole new Hunting regime, they bastardized Allison’s legacy and her new Code, and they killed most of the supernaturals in town before the Anuk-Ite turned them on each other-”

“Wait, what’s the Anuk-Ite?” Stiles asked, then paused as the rest of her tirade hit him. Eyes snapping wide, he turned to Scott, grabbing onto the (former? future?) alpha’s shoulder. “Holy shit-”

“-Allison,” Scott said, grabbing back as if he were holding onto Stiles for dear life. “Yeah, I…”

Lydia swallowed, looking down at the designer watch she didn’t even remember having two years from now.

“A _lot_ went on after your boys’ deaths, but we’ll have to talk later,” she said, scanning the school crowd. She saw one or two odd looks her away for talking to two nobodies in the social pyramid, but dismissed them with a confidence she would need to find a way to obfuscate. Two and a half years felt like an instant and like forever, right now. “I don’t see Allison-”

“She was late on her first day,” Scott said. “But then…” He looked to Lydia, hopeful.

Reshouldering her bag and standing up straight, Lydia said, “You three were sacrifices to the Nemeton, and all three of you were tied to it. Kira and I were the ones to carry out the ritual. I…I wasn’t sure if it would work at all, and then when I woke up, I had no idea whether or not any of you would remember. But if I’m here and you two are…”

Scott’s eyes looked as tearfully hopeful as she felt, and Lydia turned away before that lump could form in her throat again.

“Fingers crossed,” she murmured, taking a deep breath and directing her feet to start walking away. She missed her pack, but they weren’t the only reason she did this. “Now, I’m going to go find Jackson — and we are not letting him be Bitten again! — and Stiles, you catch up Scott, and I’ll try to catch up both of you later.”

Then, because it’s been so long, she ran back and gave them both one more squeezing-tight hug — which they returned — before trotting off for good.

~*~

Lydia kissed Jackson in greeting, already trying to find a way to end this relationship with the least amount of heartbreak for him.

Then she slunk into the girl’s bathroom to lock herself in a stall and press some tissue to her eyes to cry without _completely_ ruining her make-up.

Allison was alive, now. Allison was alive, and even if she didn’t remember them, they could still save her.

With that reminder to herself, Lydia spruced up and made it to her classroom just as the bell rang. Scott and Stiles shot her a small, encouraging smile as she took what she hoped was the right seat — this was definitely a moment where two and a half years felt like forever.

She almost slumped into her seat in relief as she looked up at Mr. Westover. She’d predicted his death during the Darach’s reign of terror, she’d last seen him just hours before Isaac and the Argents watched him die, too late to save him — and here he was now, writing on the chalkboard and telling them all to start reading the new semester syllabus.

For some reason, that was the moment she realized they would be repeating most of high school, and had to bite her lip to hold back the giggles at the realization.

The giggles faded, though, when the Principal — the one from _before_ Gerard — walked in with Allison.

Lydia glanced up, trying to see if she could catch her eye, but just the sight of her, and what looked like Allison’s own anxiety, made her look away. There was no way she could explain bursting into tears just at the introduction to a new student — not to mention it would be one of the worst first impressions to make on Allison if she hadn’t made it.

But at least that fear turned out to be moot. Lydia couldn’t hear them, but she watched as Scott handed Allison a pen, and muttered something that made Allison freeze. What? Scott must’ve tested her somehow, Lydia could see that much.

Then Allison reached into her bag and pulled out an inhaler. She’d never had asthma, and Allison would never have smiled at a stranger the way she was smiling at Scott-

“ _Scott!_ ” Mr. Westover called out. “Turn around, class is starting now.”

Both Scott and Allison were smiling like they were hiding something, and Lydia saw the little thumbs up Scott gave Stiles, whose gaze flicked over his shoulder to Lydia to see if she’d been watching.

Looking down at the desk in front of her, Allison took a deep breath then looked over to Lydia.

With a wavering smile and cursing the lump in her throat for the millionth time that day, Lydia looked her in the eye and gave her a nod of recognition. Allison grinned, before their teacher started droning on and the four of them faced forward.

Four down, just one more to go.

~*~

But that one was in New York, and the rest were _here_.

Under her own desk, in the middle of class, Lydia had texted Jackson, _We have a new girl!_ , knowing it would buy her a lot of leeway if Jackson assumed she had a new social mission.

Class ended with the ring of a bell Lydia hadn’t heard in months, and she saw the other three almost jump out of their seats, and it was only that today was the first day back from vacation — and everyone was still a little restless — that kept them from being obvious about it.

Outside, Allison didn’t even say anything before Lydia pulled her close, wrapping her in a tight hug.

“It’s not just me,” Allison murmured. “I thought…I thought I was going crazy, I was stabbed by an Oni last night and suddenly I woke up in the past and…and…”

Scott and Stiles both swore quietly, and out of the corner of her eye, Lydia could see Allison’s confusion. But it had been two years and Lydia wouldn’t let her pull away, so Allison just reached out, grabbing a hand from each of the boys and holding on tight.

They were absolutely going to be late for their next class, but Lydia neither remembered what it even was at the moment, nor cared.

“We all died at different times,” Lydia said bluntly, pressing her face into Allison’s shoulder. “Scott died a year after you did, then Stiles half a year after that, then I…Kira and I died last night, almost two years after you.”

“Feels like ages since the nogitsune clusterfuck,” Stiles grumbled, even as Allison seemed frozen in place.

This time, when Allison pulled back, Lydia let her go, knowing her tears were ruining her make-up again and no longer caring. They were going to be late anyway, might as well take a nice, long detour to the bathroom.

“We died?” she asked, looking between them all. “I…? Wait, why are we back here? _What happened?_ ”

It’s been so long. How was Lydia supposed to explain everything, let alone in a few minutes or hours or a day? How was she supposed to lay bare her failures to keep everyone safe? Allison died to protect those who could not protect themselves, and everyone else died anyway, they couldn’t protect anyone and-

“It’s a long story,” Scott said, clasping one hand on Lydia’s shoulder, a support Lydia leaned into and missed with all her being. “Which even I only know half of, and we have a lot of catching up to do.”

Lydia swallowed. “We have to find Kira, somehow, to see if she made it, and then…and then…”

She looked over at Stiles, a sharp and devious smile spreading across his face, the determined look that surviving the nogitsune had only strengthened. “And then we have a lot of work to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will a short epilogue coming ~~hopefully~~ soon. :) In the mean time, comments are ♥, including concrit!


	5. Kira Yukimura

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with only three hours to spare for [Finish Your Stories](https://teenwolflegacy.tumblr.com/post/181691563357/happy-2019-to-start-the-year-off-right-were) month, here is the final chapter of Rewind Electric!

Somehow, Kira expected time travel to be a little more… _dramatic_.

One moment, she was screaming atop the stump of the Nemeton.

The next, she was shuddering awake in a bed she hadn’t seen in years.

Months of hiding from Hunters and fighting in secret taught her how to suppress her expressions of pain, to not scream or shout if she could help it. That was probably the only reason she didn’t actually wake up screaming.

She wasn’t in pain. That was the first thing she registered.

She wasn’t in pain, she wasn’t in the woods, and she wasn’t clad in half-torn battle clothes fit for a violent summer night.

She was comfortable, wrapped in cozy pajamas in a warm bed she hadn’t seen in years, in a room she hadn’t been inside of in just as long.

Eyes slowly tracing over a cheap but sturdy desk that was among the furniture they’d had to sell when they moved to California, Kira’s chest heaved through several terrified breaths, in through her nose and out through her mouth. It took almost a dozen of these before she could gather the courage to sit up.

She had to blink a little, but turning toward the nightstand, she managed to make out a framed photo in that popsicle stick picture frame she’d made in third grade, little Kira dangling off her father’s broad shoulders as she was held up by-

Mom!

With a gasp, she reached out and yanked the stupid old picture close, taking in the face she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten.

_Mom_ , she mouthed out, tracing her finger over her mother’s hair in the picture, fluttering in the Central Park autumn wind as she twisted to keep Kira from falling off her dad’s shoulders entirely. How could Kira have forgotten her?

Well, she knew — after all, now she could remember Mom being _taken_ by the Ghost Riders, the first and last time Kira had seen her mother with all her power to bear and all her tails out. It had been like looking into a piece of deep space right there in the middle of the Beacon Hills High School indoor basketball court.

How could she forget her own mother shouting at Scott’s to “ _take care of her_ ” in a final, desperate bid to save her? Not just Mom, either — how could she forget Chris and Melissa wrapping their hands around Kira’s arms to drag her away, to take the time Mom had just bought them?

If Lydia was right, the fact that Kira was here was proof that the Ghost Riders were all gone, now, destroyed to reverse entropy — but if they weren’t, then she’d be happy to finish the job.

Kira growled a little, then startled at the purely human sound that just came out of her chest.

Right…human again.

Well, mostly. She was _born_ a kitsune, she just needed to remember how to actually reach that part of herself.

Only two years and she’d already forgotten what it was like to be a different species. She stared at the photo, trying to see it with her other eyes.

Was that a flicker? Or a spark on her finger tip?

Maybe, maybe not — but even if she really would have to wait until she was older, again, then at least ‘learning’ the process would go much faster this time.

Human-ish eyes now adjusted to the dark, she looked up and started looking around the room. It was tiny, as New York space was at a much higher premium than a small town in Beacon Hills. She was pretty sure Lydia’s mom’s walk-in closet was _literally_ bigger than her current room.

She smiled a little when she spotted the dusty old baseboards, the ones that had been — were going to be? — such a pain in the ass when they had to clean everything for the move to California. The generic desk contrasted sharply with the antique lamp on it; the lamp had made it out to Beacon Hills, but the desk hadn’t.

Through the frosty window, she could hear the faint sound of traffic in the distance, and almost cried all over again. When was the last time she’d been this close to enough people to hear that? To enough people not hiding from _anyone_ , driving around in the middle of the night without a second thought? Even in times of peace, a small, suburban town like Beacon Hills had been quiet in the middle of the night, and that had only gotten worse as everyone had been picked off by the Beast, the Ghost Riders, and the Anuk-Ite.

The traffic that once irritated her now drove her to tears of joy — even as she strained to hear it over the occasional rattles of piping from the building’s heating system, the kind that was overkill in California but barely enough in New York.

Despite the cozy pajamas and thick blanket, she shivered in the chilly air as she twisted as she looked around the room, seeing her old clothes, old books, and cheesy old accessories.

Two years ago, _now_ , she’d had no weapons. No katana sat propped up in a place of pride, nor draped lazily over a chair in its belt form. The foot of her bed lay empty, Scott’s old sweatshirt nowhere in sight because she hadn’t even met him yet in this timeline. He might not have even _bought_ that sweatshirt yet, it had fit his broad, lycanthropic shoulders so loosely in the future.

She turned back to reach for her phone — her old phone — on the nightstand, almost flinching as it cheerfully dinged in greeting when she pressed the power button.

After months on the run, of always trying to stay silent, every little click and beep of her phone sounded almost deafening.

Despite this, she grinned when saw the date, blurting out, “It worked!”

Then jerking back in surprised at the sound of her speech. Had her voice really changed that much over two and a half years?

Apparently, it had. She laughed, phone dropping into her blanketed lap, and ran her fingers through her hair…

…then blinked in surprised when her fingers slipped right out of her hair a moment too soon.

Then she laughed again, remembering that truly _awful_ haircut she’d gotten back in sophomore year. She tried to look like an action star, failed at it, and was grateful for how much of it had grown back by the time they’d moved to a new school in a new town in a new state.

One she couldn’t wait to get back too — and hopefully, this time, under much better circumstances.

Grinning, Kira pulled back the blanket and swung her legs out-

-then hissed and pulled them back as soon as her bare feet brushed the hardwood floor. California and New Mexico spoiled her, and part of her still felt _certain_ that it was summer — she’d forgotten how cold winter in New York could get.

Locating and tugging on her fluffy kitten socks, she got up, moving around the creaky floorboards despite the years since she’d last been in here. She wrapped up in the fluffier house robe, and quickly shuffled out into the chillier living room. The time-set thermostat blinked on the far wall, waiting until an hour before they’d start waking up to start heating up the rest of the apartment.

She turned away from it, going past the bathroom to the other end of the short hallway.

Pressing her ear against the door, she could already hear her dad’s light snoring through the flimsy wood.

Her parents were _right_ there. She could just open this door and see her parents again for the first time in months, her dad for the first time in almost a year…

…and then she was probably scream or cry or both, startling her parents awake and causing all sorts of questions she had no idea how to answer.

Just a few hours. She could wait just a few hours, and that was probably how long it would take for her to collect what few, remaining shreds of her wits and composure she had left, to make sure she didn’t completely lose her mind as soon as she saw them.

In the mean time…Kira never thought she would miss the sound of her dad’s snoring, or her mom’s occasional midnight muttering. Sitting here on the floor for a moment, just listening to them, couldn’t hurt — could it?

~*~

The next morning, Kira greeted the day with her face getting smushed into cold, hardwood floor when her mom opened the bedroom door.

“Wha- Kira?!”

_Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry she thinks you just saw her last night don’t cry don’t cry-_

“Umm…” She pushed herself up, smiling at her mom. This time of year, this time of morning was still dark out, so the bright daylight lamps were on, and her mom practically glowed in them, messy bed head and all. “Good morning?”

“Kira?” Dad asked, and Kira’s breath hitched at the sound. She leaned around Mom’s legs to see him scrubbing at his face as he pushed himself up in their bed, squinting in the morning lamplight. “What are you doing here?”

_Don’t you dare cry Yukimura DON’T CRY DON’T-_

“Just…napping?” she offered, wincing a little weakly. She hadn’t expected to fall asleep listening to the sound of her parents quietly living.

She managed to contain her tears, her screaming and sobbing and desperate desire for embraces she hadn’t felt in months, but apparently she still let _something_ slip, because both their expressions softened. Mom crouched in front of her as Dad crawled out of bed.

“Let me guess,” Mom asked quietly, reaching out and wrapped Kira’s hand in her own. “Bad dream?”

“…I don’t want to talk about it,” Kira murmured, indirectly confirming her mother’s guess as she ducked her head.

“Then you don’t have to,” Dad promised, also crouching down. He held his arms wide open, and Kira threw herself into his tight embrace, breathing in his awful morning breath and the hints of night sweat and citric soap. Behind her, Mom also joined in on the hug, a loose, one-armed hug as her other hand rubbed over Kira’s free arm in sympathetic circles.

It was so, _so_ good to be home.

~*~

Kira had _really_ forgotten how cold New York could get.

Much as she’s miss her few friends here, she still couldn’t wait to get back to California’s weather.

But how to actually get there? Merely telling her parents the whole truth was out of the question — they wouldn’t let her anywhere _near_ Beacon Hills if they understood the extent of what she’d been through. Mom had never been a big fan of her being in a pack in the first place, and right now her pack didn’t technically exist.

Kira had never really known Peter Hale very much, but she knew him enough that she just couldn’t imagine him as an alpha. She had an even harder time imagining Derek as an angry and terrified ‘hot mess’ as Stiles liked to describe him, and she _definitely_ couldn’t imagine Scott as an omega — he’d already been the alpha by the time she’d met him, yet if she had her dates right, he’d just been Bitten the night before.

And Peter Hale would be going around killing people, and Kira had less than a day to figure out how to spin some anonymous tips over the phone to the Beacon Hills police department if she was really alone.

Being a few hours and timezones ahead of Beacon Hills was both a blessing and a curse. It gave her a little extra time before tomorrow night over in Beacon Hills, when the next murder would likely start, but it also left her jittery today, barely able to shove down her lunch — and it was her favorite, Dad putting in that little extra effort after seeing her trembling half the morning from her ‘nightmare’.

What if Kira was alone? What if Lydia hadn’t made it, what if _no one_ else made it? How was she supposed to prevent all the calamity in Beacon Hills from nearly three thousand miles away? She knew how to find her old friends on Facebook and Instagram, but what if that wasn’t enough?

What if-

Sitting in a quiet corner of the cafeteria — she did _not_ miss having to eat indoors during school lunch — Kira only barely heard her phone ring.

She didn’t recognize the exact number, but she sure recognized that area code.

Swallowing down her hope, she plugged in her earphones and answered.

“H-Hello?” she answered.

For a moment, there was silence, a pair of voices in the background muttering and someone shushing them, over the sound of breathing into the phone.

“This…” Kira cleared her throat, not daring to hope and not daring _not_ to. “This is Kira Yukimura. Who is calling me?”

“Hello, Ms. Yukimura,” a familiar voice greeted, and Kira slumped in relief, pressing the heel of her palms into her eyes to keep from crying again — not that her make-up wasn’t horribly smudged already. “I promise you this isn’t a telemarketing call-”

“I know it isn’t, Lydia,” Kira said, voice thick as she talked around the growing lump in her throat. “Isn’t it second-period in Beacon Hills, right now?”

For a moment, there was silence, then suddenly, her ears were filled with the sound of quiet cheering.

None of them were Lydia, but Kira recognized all of them.

_All_ of them.

There was a familiar scuffle as someone must’ve stolen the phone or handed over, then a voice that made every fiber of Kira’s heart squeeze tight asked, “Kira?”

“Scott,” she breathed out.

“Kira!” he greeted. “I — I swear I just saw you, I died last night but Stiles and Lydia say it was ages ago.” A pause, a swallow, then- “Did you really give my mom Theo’s head in a box?”

“Okay, seriously,” Allison’s voice said from the background. “Who the hell is Theo?”

Kira burst out laughing, doubling over herself until her forehead was pressing into the linoleum surface of the table. As Stiles started ranting, Kira smiled, lifting her head to wipe away the tears.

The other loners and misfits sitting around the table eyed her warily — someone inched their chair away from her. But with her pack on the phone and waiting for her on the other side of the country, she couldn’t care less.

She was home, and she wasn’t alone.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Kira offered, cutting off Stiles mid-rant. “But I guess we have time, now.”

There was a moment as the implications of that sunk in.

“Yeah,” Allison finally agreed, sounding as giddy as Kira felt, the rest of their little pack sighing as all the possibilities started to unfold in front of them. “I guess we do.”

“So,” Kira said, smiling into the empty lunch box in front of her. “Where should we start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see, I've officially added this to a series, "Take the Third Door Together". I'm trying to not start things I can't finish this year, but if I do continue this series - or just add little drabbles and one-shots to this universe - it'll be in that series. So if you're interested in more, please subscribe!

**Author's Note:**

> If you're on Discord and looking for more Teen Wolf fans, [drop on by](https://discordapp.com/invite/5dhA527)! :)


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